Published time: September 25, 2013 21:14
Reuters / Gary Cameron
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, could soon appear again on Capitol Hill. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) says she’s prepared a draft bill that will complement the House-penned CISPA that was approved earlier this year.
Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
told reporters at The Hill on Tuesday that she intends on moving
forward with a draft bill she helped created to serve as a
counterpart to the cybersecurity act approved in the House of Representatives in April by
a vote of 288-to-127.
Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) and Dutch Ruppersberger originally
introduced CISPA in late 2011 and touted it as a necessary
implement to counter cyberattacks waged at the computer systems
of businesses based in the United States. It was passed by the
House in mid-2012 but failed to make its way to the Senate,
prompting Rogers and Ruppersberger to reintroduce CISPA this past February.
“It is time to stop admiring this problem and deal with it
immediately,”Rogers said then.“Congress urgently needs
to pass our cyber threat information sharing bill to protect our
national security, our economy and US jobs.”
Rogers and Ruppersberger described their bill as a means to
“provide for the sharing of certain cyber threat intelligence
and cyber threat information between the intelligence community
and cybersecurity entities” by encouraging private companies
such as Google, Facebook and others to hand over to the government
any data that could be used to combat cyberattacks and attempted
acts of online espionage. Critics, including the American Civil
Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the
language in the bill is too broad, however, and could allow for
the oversharing of personal information between the government
and private sector.
Given the revelations attributed to National Security Agency
leaker Edward Snowden starting this past June — namely
evidence that the federal government and US intelligence
community has secretly been collecting information about the communications of
American citizens — an attempt to pass a CISPA-like bill in both
chambers of Congress could be more unlikely to advance than even
last year’s efforts.
The second incarnation of CISPA has garnered the support of the
Republican-controlled House since being reintroduced earlier this
year, but a comparable Senate version seemed unlikely to emerge
in the months since, even before Snowden first began disclosing
top-secret NSA documents in June. Only days after the House
version was approved, a staffer for Senate Commerce Committee
chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) told Huffington Post
that while the lawmaker considers information sharing to be “a
key component of cybersecurity legislation,” he believed that
“the Senate will not take up CISPA.”
“We are currently drafting a bipartisan information sharing
bill and will proceed as soon as we come to an
agreement,” Feinstein’s office said in a statement
shortly after.
Feinstein is now reportedly getting ready to push that bill
forward on the Hill, but even one co-author of CISPA said the
Snowden revelations may have ravaged the chance of a
cybersecurity act advancing all the way to the White House.
“Snowden clearly hurt our chances to have an unconfused debate
about what we’re trying to accomplish,” Rogers said Wednesday
during an event at the US Chamber of Commerce, The Hill’s Kate
Tummarello reported.
“The government really doesn’t care about what you’re talking
about on your email,” Facebook or Twitter, he said. “They
are looking to stop the next terrorist attack.”
According to Tummarello, Rogers insisted at Wednesday’s event
that the NSA does “not monitor the domestic Internet usage of
Americans.” Should CISPA be approved, that would be a job
that private businesses will voluntarily take up themselves.
Under CISPA, private companies that are assaulted with
cyberattacks would be legally allowed to share information with
other companies and even the federal government to get a firmer
grasp on hacking attempts and try to combat them without the risk
of facing litigation over allowing that data to change hands.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence that
overseas over a dozen federal agencies including the NSA,
recently apologized to Feinstein and her committee for being
“clearly erroneous” when he said the government did not
collect data on millions of Americans. When a bi-partisan group
of senators proposed reform to the government’s surveillance
programs in Washington on Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Rand Paul
(R-Kentucky) said Clapper’s resignation would be required to
bring any “credibility” back to the US intelligence
community.
The White House said in both 2012 and 2013 that Pres. Obama would be advised to veto CISPA
if it passes Congress.
Copyright: RT