As security experts and digital rights groups rail against a sweeping cyber information-sharing measure, Congressional leadership has bowed to the pressure and pushed back a vote on the legislation.
The bill, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, was originally scheduled to be voted on at the end of July. Senate Majority Whip, John Cornyn (R-Texas), however, announced Tuesday that the bill likely won’t be brought to the floor until the fall, after the month-long August recess.
“I think we’re just running out time,” he told reporters, according to The Hill.
In a letter addressed to President Obama sent on Monday, a coalition of security experts and digital rights groups said that the bill would severely compromise Americans’ privacy.
“CISA fails to address many of the concerns raised about preceding information sharing bills that the Administration opposed, and it threatens to undermine privacy and civil liberties, and increase cyber-surveillance. We strongly oppose CISA and we urge you to again defend privacy and civil liberties by voicing your opposition and your intention to veto it,” the missive said.
The legislation would grant corporations broad legal immunity for sharing data ostensibly related to cyber threats with the government. It would give companies the ability to collect large amounts of information about their users and share it with federal agencies, while at the same time exempting that trove from Freedom of Information Act requests aimed at learning more about what kinds of data is being collected and examined.
The groups also warned that CISA would empower the government in ways that go beyond the scope of cybersecurity, since the measure “authorizes federal, state, and local governments to use cyber threat indicators to investigate crimes that have nothing to do with cybersecurity, such as robbery, arson, and carjacking, as well as identity theft and trade secret violations.”
In response to these and related concerns, the nonprofit digital rights group Fight for the Future recently launched a new campaign called “Operation: Fax Big Brother” in opposition to the measure.
Organizers of the initiative have flooded Congressional offices with faxes expressing opposition to the bill, in a bid to shame legislators about their digital literacy.
“It’s clear Congress is completely out of touch with modern technology, so this week, as Congress rushes toward a vote on CISA, we are going to send them thousands of faxes, a technology from the 1980s that is hopefully antiquated enough for them to understand,” part of the campaign website reads.
“The truth is that CISA could not have prevented the [Office of Personnel Management] hack, and no Senator could explain how it could have,” the website says, referring to a major breach of the Office of Personnel Management revealed in June that compromised the personal information of millions of federal workers.
“Congress and the NSA are using irrational hysteria to turn the Internet into a place where the government has overly broad, unchecked powers.”
In June, an attempt by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to attach the bill to the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual defense policy bill, was unsuccessful. Senior Senate Republicans spoke on the Senate floor at that time arguing that it was critical to national security in the wake of the OPM hack and other cyberattacks.
But according to numerous reports, the OPM breach was the result not of a lack of information-sharing between the government and the private sector, but of bureaucratic failings. OPM, the investigations found, failed to implement basic security measures, such as encryption.
On Tuesday, the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies convened a hearing entitled “Promoting and Incentivizing Cybersecurity Best Practices.” Further hearings on cybersecurity are slated for Wednesday and Thursday in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
