Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said in a statement on April 18 that CISPA’s privacy protections are “insufficient.”
A committee aide told ZDNet on Thursday that Rockefeller believes the Senate will not take up CISPA. The White House has also said the President won’t sign the House bill.
via CISPA ‘dead’ in Senate, privacy concerns cited
The U.S. House of Representatives will soon vote on final passage of H.R. 624, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2013 (CISPA).
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank, strongly urges Members of the House of Representatives to vote “Nay” on passage of CISPA.
The following statement may be attributed to Ryan Radia, Associate Director of the Center for Technology & Innovation at CEI:
We support voluntary information sharing about cyber threats and applaud lawmakers for rethinking outdated federal laws that inhibit Web firms’ ability to defend their networks. Yet CISPA goes far beyond untangling this web of legal barriers – it voids private contracts and undermines the rule of law. Although a bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Rep. Justin Amash, proposed an amendment to address these concerns, the House Rules Committee rejected this crucial amendment.
While CISPA’s sponsors emphasize “voluntary” information sharing, the bill actually cannibalizes private contracts between cloud computing providers and their customers, which include many individuals and small businesses. CISPA’s sweeping immunity provision in subsection (b)(4) permits a provider to break its privacy promises to users with impunity. Indeed, the bill gives firms blanket immunity for all acts involving cyber threat information sharing, so long as such acts are taken in “good faith” – even if companies have not taken any reasonable steps prior to sharing information to ensure that it pertains to an actual cyber threat.
CISPA also permits government agencies to recklessly mishandle private information, providing absolutely no recourse to businesses and individuals harmed by such wrongdoing unless the violation is “willful[] or intentional[].”
If information sharing is to be truly voluntarily – and if the cloud computing revolution is to realize its vast potential – Internet providers must be able to make enforceable promises about when they’ll share user information and with whom. CISPA violates this proviso and should be rejected by the House of Representatives.
Full article: http://cei.org/news- … -undermines-rule-law
Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other Internet companies and e-mail providers will be prohibited from making legally binding promises to protect your privacy, thanks to a vote this afternoon in the U.S. House of Representatives.
By a 5-8 vote, the House Rules committee rejected a bipartisan fix to the CISPA data-sharing bill that would have ensured companies’ privacy promises — including their terms of use and privacy policies — remained valid and legally enforceable in the future.
The vote came after Rep. Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican who’s the committee’s influential chairman, urged his colleagues to vote against the amendment (PDF). All of the committee’s eight GOP members voted against the amendment, and all the Democrats supported it. (See CNET’s CISPA FAQ.)
It also came hours after a formal veto threat from the Obama administration, citing privacy and other concerns about CISPA. A House floor debate is scheduled to begin tomorrow, which now will not include a vote on the amendment.
“We’re disappointed that such a commonsense reform won’t even get a vote,” Will Adams, a spokesman for Rep. Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican who co-sponsored the amendment, told CNET this evening. “When Americans sign up for service with their phone company or their Internet provider they should be entitled to the privacy protections that the companies promise them. Giving companies legal cover to break their contracts with consumers is bad policy and a disservice to the American people.”
Congress should have been able to debate the amendment this week because it would ensure Americans’ privacy rights, said Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat and former Internet entrepreneur. That includes, he said, the rights of “users who have given their information to the company under the explicit assurance of the terms of use that it wouldn’t be shared.”
Otherwise, Polis said, CISPA means Internet and other companies will be “completely exonerated from any risk of liability” if they open their databases with confidential customer information to the feds and even private-sector firms.
The amendment was only six lines long. It would have altered the latest version of CISPA (PDF) by saying the legislation does not authorize a company “to breach a contract with any other party,” including a terms of service agreement.
If it had been adopted during the floor debate, it would have allowed e-mail providers, social networks, and other companies to pledge not to share customers’ confidential information with the National Security Agency, Homeland Security, or any other organization under CISPA — and made that pledge legally enforceable in court.
CISPA is controversial because it overrules all existing federal and state laws by saying “notwithstanding any other provision of law,” including a privacy policy or terms of service agreement, companies may share certain confidential customer information “with any other entity, including the federal government.”
Full article: http://news.cnet.com … -to-protect-privacy/
