Prospects that the Senate will pass sweeping cyber security legislation before the upcoming summer recess dimmed on Tuesday as Senate Democrats shut down an expedited route for the bill.
Entering party luncheons on Tuesday afternoon, supporters of the Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA) had hoped to whip Senators into backing a proposal for a quicker process put forward by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), however, took to the floor after the party meetings and described McConnell’s proposed amendment process a gimmick.
“Having a robust amendment process has nothing to do with having amendments pending,” Reid said on the floor, explaining that McConnell may allow amendments to be offered, but could forbid votes on them.
“I can’t imagine how he could make this offer with a straight face. To have amendments pending? That’s like nothing,” Reid said. He added that he wants there to be a limited number of amendments considered and voted on as part of any deal to expedite the legislation.
A failure to reach a compromise on the CISA proposal, which would have led to a consideration on procedural matters Wednesday, pushes potential votes on the legislation closer to Friday, when Senators will join their House colleagues already on a five-week long recess.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) also took to the Senate floor on Tuesday afternoon to urge passage of CISA. He called Reid’s rejection “disgraceful,” and claimed that opponents were “putting this nation in danger by not allowing the Senate of the United States to act against a very real threat to our very existence.”
Digital privacy advocates disagree with this assessment, and argue that legislation granting companies immunity to share wide swaths of information with the government, as CISA proposes, wouldn’t make the nation’s digital infrastructure any safer, and could lead to abuse by the government’s surveillance organs
Two of CISA’s chief supporters, Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) attempted on Tuesday to assuage some of those privacy concerns by putting forward civil liberties language in a manager’s amendment, but it didn’t go far enough to garner support from digital rights groups.
“CISA is a surveillance bill disguised as a cybersecurity bill,” said Drew Mitnick, the policy counsel at Access. “The changes under the Manager’s Amendment would not stop the government from instantly passing along information to intelligence agencies or keep law enforcement from using information to prosecute whistleblowers.”
Mitnick added that “the bill includes broad liability protection for companies violating the privacy rights of their users. It still permits defensive measures with harmful external effects. It still lacks transparency.”
Privacy-minded Senators, meanwhile, have moved to tie the passage of CISA to other legislation that could boost digital privacy protections for computer.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) was offered as an amendment to CISA on Tuesday by Sens. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). If passed, the measure would require law enforcement officers to obtain a warrant before reading emails that are stored in the cloud for more than 180 days.
“Most Americans would be shocked to learn that because of a decades old quirk in the law, their emails and other digital communications older than 180 days are not fully protected by the 4th Amendment,” Sen. Lee said in a press release on Tuesday, adding that it is “far past time we updated federal law on digital privacy.”
Sen. Leahy echoed praise for ECPA, adding that the amendment “ensures that the private information Americans electronically store in the cloud gets the same protections as the private information they physically store at home.”
