SurveillanceCivil liberties coalition condemns cybersecurity bill

Pro-privacy, pro-security cybersecurity bill // Source: house.gov

Civil libertarians in the United States have a new ally in the fight against the new surveillance bill now being considered in Congress: librarians. The critics of the bill call it both “unhelpful” and “dangerous to Americans’ civil liberties.”

The Hill reports that the American Library Association, the world’s largest and oldest library affiliation, has joined a coalition of eighteen other groups, including Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, and FreedomWorks to sign letter to the White House and Congress which urges lawmakers to vote against the final version of a bill when it emerges from conference.

The coalition says the bill sharply expand government surveillance at the same time that it fails to tackle cyberattacks.

House speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) has been actively pushing for reconciliation of two bills, the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (PCNA) and the National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement with the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA), which passed a Senate vote in October.

The Hillnotes that the speed with which Ryan is pushing through a compromise has worried privacy activists. “We’ve just learned that the Intelligence Committees are trying to pull a fast one,” Nathan White, senior legislative manager at digital rights advocate Access, said in a recent email to supporters. “They’ve been negotiating in secret and came up with a Frankenstein bill – that has some of the worst parts from both the House and the Senate versions.”

The privacy coalition’s letter claims that the proposed “conference” legislation would:

• Create a loophole that would allow the president to remove the Department of Homeland Security, a civilian agency, as the lead government entity managing information sharing.
• Reduce privacy protections for Americans’ personal information.
• Over-expand the term “cyber threat” to facilitate the prosecution of crimes unrelated to cybersecurity.
• Expand already broad liability protection for information disclosure.
• Pre-empt state, local or tribal disclosure laws on any cyber-threat information shared by or with a state, tribal or local government.
• Eliminate a directive to ensure data integrity.

The coalition also argues that the legislation would expand the amount of sensitive information held “by government agencies with dismal records on data security” and institute “blind, automatic transfer of personal information to intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, that would be authorized to use the information for non-cybersecurity purposes.”

“The final version of this bill is an insult to the public and puts all of us in greater danger of cyber-attacks and government surveillance,” said Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, who organized the letter. “This was already a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation, and now even the meager privacy protections it provided have been gutted, exposing it for what it really is: a bill to dramatically expand abusive government spying.”