[Infowarrior] - CISA's privacy protections likely removed

[Richard Forno]

Final Text Of CISA Apparently Removed What Little Privacy Protections Had Been In There

from the surprise-surprise dept

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151207/17063433015/final-text-cisa-apparently-removed-what-little-privacy-protections-had-been-there.shtml

Back in October, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to approve CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which has nothing to with cybersecurity at all, and is almost entirely a surveillance bill in disguise. Want to know the proof: many of the most vocal supporters of CISA, who talked up how important "cybersecurity" is these days are the very same people now looking to undermine encryption. 

Either way, there were significant differences between the version approved in the House, and thus Congress needed to reconcile the bills -- and apparently that means removing what little privacy protections were already in the bill:

And it now appears the final language is unlikely to include notable privacy provisions that digital rights and civil liberties groups insist are necessary to reduce the odds the bill enables greater government surveillance.

Basically, it looks like Congressional leadership decided to pull the worst parts from the various bills and mash them together into a super bill of pure terribleness. Not only will it favor the Senate bill, over the House's, but it will also pull ideas from the competing bill that was put forth by the House Intelligence Committee, rather than the one put forth by the Homeland Security Committee. 

That, alone, should be rather telling. For all the talk about how this is about "security" and not at all about helping the intelligence community, why is it that the Intelligence Committee's bill whose language is surviving, while the Homeland Security Committee's language is being deleted?

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