Long-delayed domestic spying bill included in omnibus
By Cory Bennett - 12/16/15 02:31 AM EST
A long-delayed cybersecurity bill was included in the sweeping omnibus spending deal released early Wednesday.
The inclusion likely ensures the biggest cyber bill in years will soon get to President Obama’s desk, a significant win for the bill’s backers, who scrambled to finish negotiations on the compromise text in recent weeks.
The legislation would provide incentives to encourage businesses to share more data on hackers with the government.
Negotiators have been working on the cyber measure’s final language since the Senate passed a version from the Intelligence Committee in October. The House passed its two complementary bills in April: one from that chamber's Intelligence panel and another from Homeland Security.
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/263403-long-delayed-cyber-bill-included-in-omnibus
If you want to know how bad this is, read:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151215/06470133083/congress-drops-all-pretense-quietly-turns-cisa-into-full-surveillance-bill.shtml
Congress Drops All Pretense: Quietly Turns CISA Into A Full On Surveillance Bill
from the even-worse-than-before dept
Remember CISA? The "Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act"? It's getting much, much worse, with Congress and the administration looking to ram it through -- in the process, dropping any pretense that it's not a surveillance bill.
As you may recall, Congress and the White House have been pushing for a "cybersecurity" bill, for a few years now, that has never actually been a cybersecurity bill. Senator Ron Wyden was one of the only people in Congress willing to stand up and directly say what it was: "it's a surveillance bill by another name." And, by now, you should know that when Senator Wyden says that there's a secret interpretation of a bill that will increase surveillance and is at odds with the public's understanding of a bill, you should to listen. He's said so in the past and has been right... multiple times.
Either way, a version of CISA passed the House a while back, with at least some elements of privacy protection included. Then, a few months ago it passed the Senate in a much weaker state. The two different versions need to be reconciled, and it's been worked on. However, as we noted recently, the intelligence community has basically taken over the process and more or less stripped out what few privacy protections there were.
And the latest is that it's getting worse. Not only is Congress looking to include it in the end of year omnibus bill -- basically a "must pass" bill -- to make sure it gets passed, but it's clearly dropping all pretense that CISA isn't about surveillance. Here's what we're hearing from people involved in the latest negotiations.
