'Codifying' Government Surveillance, Senate Passes CISA

"If President Obama does not veto this bill, he'll be showing that his administration never truly cared about the open Internet," rights group says

by

Nadia Prupis, staff writer

Update:

The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) without any of the proposed amendments that would have strengthened user protections. The bill passed 74-21.

Rights groups immediately called for President Barack Obama to veto the bill and vowed to keep pressure up.

"Every senator supporting #CISA today voted against a world with freedom, democracy, and basic human rights," tweeted digital rights organization Fight for the Future. "If President Obama does not veto this bill, he'll be showing that his administration never truly cared about the open Internet."

"This vote will go down as the moment Congress codified the US government’s unconstitutional spying. A sad day for the Internet," the group added.

Earlier:

As the U.S. Senate gears up for a vote on the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) on Tuesday, privacy advocates are galvanizing an 11th-hour push against the bill they say does nothing more than expand government spying powers.

A slew of digital rights groups including Fight for the Future and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with whistleblower Edward Snowden and outspoken CISA opponent Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), joined forces Monday night for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit, which has also come out against the bill. The session was the latest action by civil society groups, activists, and tech companies calling onCongress to reject CISA for its anti-privacy provisions.

"CISA isn't a cybersecurity bill," Snowden wrote during the Q&A. "It's not going to stop any attacks. It's not going to make us any safer. It's a surveillance bill."

Supporters of CISA—including Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.)—say the bill would make it easier for tech companies to share data in cases of security breaches and other digital attacks. But critics say there aren't enough safeguards in place to protect user privacy and the bill only works to serve intelligence agencies in domestic surveillance operations.

"What it allows is for the companies you interact with every day—visibly, like Facebook, or invisibly, like AT&T—to indiscriminately share private records about your interactions and activities with the government," Snowden wrote on Monday. "CISA allows private companies to immediately share a perfect record of your private activities the instant you click a link, log in, make a purchase, and so on—and the government with reward for doing it by granting them a special form of legal immunity for their cooperation."

Fight for the Future campaign director Evan Greer said the Senate's vote on Tuesday "will go down in history as the moment that lawmakers decided not only what sort of Internet our children and our children's children will have, but what sort of world they will live in."

The campaigns, which are being waged under the hashtag #StopCISA, urge senators to oppose the bill and protect civil liberties.

Greer added, "Every Senator who votes for CISA will be voting for a world without freedom of expression, a world without true democracy, a world without basic human rights. And they will be voting for their own removal from office, because the Internet will not forget which side of history they stood on."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/10/27/codifying-government-surveillance-senate-passes-cisa