Negotiated in secret and tucked in legislation thousands of pages long, Congress is about to pass an awful surveillance bill under the guise of “cybersecurity” that could open the door to the NSA acquiring much more private information of Americans.
You may remember that Congress already passed the “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act” (Cisa) last fall – a surveillance bill in cybersecurity’s clothing.
It essentially carved a giant hole in all our privacy laws and gave
technology and telecommunications companies a free hand to give all
sorts of private information – including our emails – to the government
without any court process whatsoever, as long as there was some sort of
vague rationale involving “cybersecurity”.
But now the legislation has gotten even worse. Because the House and
Senate passed slightly different versions, they had to be combined and
voted on one more time – and, in negotiations, the bill’s most fervent
supporters decided to strip away
the (already really weak) privacy provisions from both the House and
Senate versions. These protections, while wholly inadequate, were the
only reasons that many members of Congress who would’ve otherwise
opposed Cisa voted for it.
The latest version of the bill
gives even more immunity from privacy lawsuits to companies like Google
or Facebook or AT&T when they hand over your private information as
long as there’s some vague “cybersecurity” reason – even if they commit
gross negligence in handing it over. The bill also makes it much more
likely that companies will hand any and all information directly to
intelligence agencies like the NSA.
Not that we’ll know anything about what the companies do hand over:
the new version also carves out an exemption in the Freedom of
Information Act that prevents anyone from requesting data on the type of
information requested or the amount that’s being handed over.