Privacy advocates won’t like the final language of new cybersecurity legislation

(Cyberwar.news) Advocates for digital rights are already opposed to a major cybersecurity bill because they say it does not contain strong enough language to ensure Americans’ privacy, The Hill has reported.

Over the past few weeks negotiators from the House and Senate have worked off-the-record in a bid to reach a compromise between several competing versions of cyber legislation that seeks to encourage tech firms to share more data on hacking threats with federal agencies.

The Senate passed its version of the legislation in October, after the House passed a pair of complementary bills in April, The Hill noted. In recent days both sides have increased discussion of merging the separate pieces of legislation with the aim of getting something on President Obama’s desk by year’s end.

However, now it looks as though the final language of the bill won’t include notable privacy provisions that digital rights and civil libertarians have insisted be included to reduce the chance the legislation will wind up giving the government outsized surveillance powers.

The Hill further reported:

Many industry groups, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers and even the White House have insisted the cyber bill is a necessary first step to better understanding and thwarting the cyberattacks that have plagued the country in recent years.

A number of industry groups, a bipartisan group of lawmakers and the Obama administration have all insisted that new cyber legislation is vital to understanding and stopping cyberattacks like those that have penetrated sensitive government and private corporate IT systems in recent years.

However, several tech firms, technologists and privacy advocates say that the measure will simply provide the federal government and spy agencies like NSA with more personal data on citizens only a few months after Congress voted to curtail surveillance programs. As such, they have pushed for changes they believe will mitigate some of the final bill’s privacy damage.

But the final version is not likely to satisfy many privacy advocates, The Hill reported, according to a number of people on and off Capitol Hill who have knowledge of the talks.

The Senate’s bill, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, is believed to be the most favored final version of the finished language. Sources said the finished version is also likely to contain language that came from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The Hill reported further:

This completed product would mostly sideline the privacy advocate-preferred bill from the House Homeland Security Committee. They believe the Homeland Security bill includes the strongest provisions to protect people’s sensitive data from falling into the NSA’s hands.

In particular, the Homeland Security legislation would give the Department of Homeland Security the greatest role in collecting cyber threat data from the private sector and then disseminating that information to various other agencies throughout the federal government.

“We’ve just learned that the Intelligence Committees are trying to pull a fast one,” Nathan White, senior legislative manager at digital rights advocate Access, said in a recent email to supporters. “They’ve been negotiating in secret and came up with a Frankenstein bill — that has some of the worst parts from both the House and the Senate versions.”

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The Hill

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