White House issues privacy warning on CISPA-style laws
Even Berners-Lee and the EFF weigh in
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The White House has struck a pro-privacy stance on online security legislation such as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which comes up for vote in the US House of Representatives next week.
"The nation’s critical infrastructure cyber vulnerabilities will not be addressed by information sharing alone," National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told The Hill. "Information sharing provisions must include robust safeguards to preserve the privacy and civil liberties of our citizens. Legislation without new authorities to address our nation’s critical infrastructure vulnerabilities, or legislation that would sacrifice the privacy of our citizens in the name of security, will not meet our nation's urgent needs."
While careful not to mention CISPA by name, the White House statement comes up at an interesting time for the law. CISPA has over 100 politicians signed up in support ahead of next week's vote but a wave of online protest has been growing against it, similar to that seen against SOPA and PIPA, with the EFF beginning a week of protests against CISPA on Monday.
"CISPA would allow ISPs, social networking sites, and anyone else handling Internet communications to monitor users and pass information to the government without any judicial oversight," said EFF Activism Director Rainey Reitman in a statement. "The language of this bill is dangerously vague, so that personal online activity – from the mundane to the intimate – could be implicated."
A separate protest petition aimed at Microsoft, Facebook and IBM for supporting CISPA has close to 250,000 signatures, and Sir Tim Berners-Less called CISPA a serious threat to online freedom and called for it to be dropped in an interview yesterday.
"The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor their internet activity is amazing," he explained. "You get to know every detail; you get to know more intimate details of their personal life than any person that they talk to."
As it stands CISPA would set up a mechanism to disperse security updates to commercial companies and utilities. It would also allow government agencies to request personal data on suspects from companies or utilities, indemnify companies who handed it over.
Passing on such data would be entirely voluntary the sponsors argue, and parts of it could be stripped of some identity data. Facebook has said that it supports CISPA for just this reason, but the EFF has warned that the law as it stands is so loosely worded that it could be used for more than protecting the US infrastructure from hackers at home and abroad.
The statement came after top administrations officials briefed the House on the White House's view of forthcoming legislation. In a closed session Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller, National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Stephanie O'Sullivan briefed the politicos on the current state of the cyberwar. ®
COMMENTS
If
ISP/Google/Yahoo!/whoever, selected one of the 100 politicians who support this, at random, and publish _everything_ they have on that politician, this nonsense would be brought to a halt pretty sharpish.
And the winner is ... Bin Laden
When you consider how the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution has been serially violated;how people have lost any pretence of privacy; how (in the UK) you can be jailed for not divulging a password; how much this 'security theatre' is costing and what government programs for deserving people have suffered, I find it very hard to accept the US, or any country, have 'won'.
One man, and a pile of his money, have changed the world dramatically no matter what your perspective is, religious or otherwise,
How many 'terrorists', real or imagined, have been caught by those millions of CCTV cameras that record the daily minutia of Brits going about their daily business, BEFORE an atrocity? And don't even suggest those FBI set-up jobs are anything more than theatre.
As I said, IMHO, Bin Laden won, hands down.
tongue, cheek, etc
The excuse used by those in power for taking away the rights of their citizens during the naughties was 'The War On Terror™'. This decade the excuse looks as if it's going to be 'cyber threats'. The threats may be real, but inevitably they'll be blown out of proportion to force through legislation that does away with those pesky civil liberties.
I do wonder if those in power have made a bit of an error with this one though. I'm sure the whole idea of 'cyber threats' sounded nicely vague and ominous when they were hatching these plans but whereas the public generally know f--- all about the middle east and can be made to fear it, they're slightly more clued up when it comes to the internet.
I'm off to go line my house with tinfoil in case cyberwarfare breaks out.
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