SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
[...] Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, is an out and out surveillance bill masquerading as a cybersecurity bill. It won't stop hackers. Instead, it essentially legalizes all forms of government and corporate spying.
Here's how it works. Companies would be given new authority to monitor their users -- on their own systems as well as those of any other entity -- and then, in order to get immunity from virtually all existing surveillance laws, they would be encouraged to share vaguely defined "cyber threat indicators" with the government. This could be anything from email content, to passwords, IP addresses, or personal information associated with an account. The language of the bill is written to encourage companies to share liberally and include as many personal details as possible.
That information could then be used to further exploit a loophole in surveillance laws that gives the government legal authority for their holy grail -- "upstream" collection of domestic data directly from the cables and switches that make up the Internet.
[...] CISA would create a huge expansion of the "backdoor" search capabilities that the government uses to skirt the 4th Amendment and spy on Internet users without warrants and with virtually no oversight.
All of this information can be passed around the government and handed down to local law enforcement to be used in investigations that have nothing to do with cyber crime, without requiring them to ever pull a warrant. So CISA would give law enforcement a ton of new data with which to prosecute you for virtually any crime while simultaneously protecting the corporations that share the data from prosecution for any crimes possibly related to it.
Will CISA be used against the guilty, or the innocent?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by captain normal on Friday July 31 2015, @12:21AM
The only place I've heard that Google was involved in drafting the CISA is this one blog from The Hill, a rather suspect source for information. I've been following this on EFF: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/03/senate-intelligence-committee-advances-terrible-cybersecurity-bill-surveillance [eff.org]
Blaming Google is a real stretch. Mostly the companies doing the collecting of information and defending their positions by virtue of this bill are the big ISPs---the telcos and cable companies. Their're the ones that have been collecting such info for many years and for the NSA for the last few years.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @01:00AM
> The only place I've heard that Google was involved in drafting the CISA is this one blog from The Hill,
You didn't hear it from this one blog either. The point of the article is not that Google collaborated to write the bill, it is that if the bill comes to pass all bigcorps will end up as collaborators because of the incentives built into the bill.
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Friday July 31 2015, @03:36AM
"CISA: the dirty deal between Google and the NSA that no one is talking about"
The title of TFA.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Friday July 31 2015, @04:38AM
Well, Google and the NSA have been working together on quantum computing and machine learning. I wouldn't be surprised if they cooperated on other things as well.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Friday July 31 2015, @04:58PM
You might be right. This might be part of the recently revealed MPAA smear Google campaign [techdirt.com] to make them look bad and turn public opinion against them. Then again, Google has done enough evil that they cannot be trusted.
I am a crackpot