Lawmakers Have Snuck CISA Into a Bill That Is Guaranteed to Become a Law by Jason Koebler.
From the post:
To anyone who has protested the sweeping, vague, and privacy-killing iterations of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act or the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act over the last several years, sorry, lawmakers have heard you, and they have ignored you.
That sounds bleak, but lawmakers have stripped the very bad CISA bill of almost all of its privacy protections and have inserted the full text of it into a bill that is essentially guaranteed to be passed and will certainly not be vetoed by President Obama.
CISA allows private companies to pass your personal information and online goings-on to the federal government and local law enforcement if it suspects a “cybersecurity threat,” a term so broadly defined that it can apply to “anomalous patterns of communication” and can be used to gather information about just about any crime, cyber or not.
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At 2 AM Wednesday morning, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan unveiled a 2000-page budget bill that will fund the federal government well into next year. The omnibus spending bill, as it’s usually referred to, is the result of countless hours of backroom dealings and negotiations between Republicans and Democrats.
Without the budget bill (or a short-term emergency measure), the government shuts down, as it did in 2013 for 16 days when lawmakers couldn’t reach a budget deal. It contains dozens of measures that make the country run, and once it’s released and agreed to, it’s basically a guarantee to pass. Voting against it or vetoing it is politically costly, which is kind of the point: Republicans get some things they want, Democrats get some things they want, no one is totally happy but they live with it anyway. This is how countless pieces of bad legislation get passed in America—as riders on extremely important pieces of legislation that are politically difficult to vote against.
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See Jason’s post for the full story but you get the gist of it, your privacy rights will be terminated to a large degree this coming Friday.
I don’t accept Jason’s fatalism, however.
There still remains time for members of Congress to strip the rider from the budget bill, but only if everyone raises hell with their representatives and senators between now and Friday.
We need to overload every switchboard in the 202 area code with legitimate, personal calls to representatives and senators. Fill up every voice mail box, every online message storage, etc.
Those of you will personal phone numbers, put them to good use. Call, now!
This may not make any difference, but, members of Congress can’t say they weren’t warned before taking this fateful step.
When Congress signals it doesn’t care about our privacy, then we damned sure don’t have to care about theirs.