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CISA Surveillance Bill Hidden Inside Last Night's Budget Bill (engadget.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the one-more-thing dept.

An anonymous reader writes that the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) was inserted into the omnibus budget deal passed by the House of Representatives late last night. Engadget reports: "Last night's budget bill wasn't all about avoiding a government shutdown. Packed inside the 2,000-page bill announced by Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) is the full text of the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) of 2015. If you'll recall, the measure passed the Senate back in October, leaving it up to the House to approve the bill that encourages businesses to share details of security breaches and cyber attacks. Despite being labeled as cybersecurity legislation, critics of CISA argue that it's a surveillance bill that would allow companies to share user info with the US government and other businesses. As TechDirt points out, this version of the bill stripped important protections that would've prevented directly sharing details with the NSA and required any personally identifying details to be removed before being shared. It also removes restrictions on how the government can use the data."

7 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Something I don't understand by gregfortune · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So say that I'm a Rep that is really trying hard to do the right thing and represent my constituent properly. This bill shows up for a vote and it's a 2000 page document. I probably read the initial version of the bill from front to back and was happy with it. Now, that 2000 page document has been modified in some interesting way right before the vote. Am I expected to read the entire thing again and just happen to notice the changes or is some kind of "diff" system widely available and used so it's easy to pick up these changes and evaluate them?

    It just seems like we read frequently about stuff being "hidden" or "snuck in." If some way to compare versions easily is available, then "hidden" is just a terrible excuse for someone not doing even a cursory review of the changes. If a way to compare versions isn't available, why the heck not?

    1. Re:Something I don't understand by Nidi62 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So say that I'm a Rep that is really trying hard to do the right thing and represent my constituent properly. This bill shows up for a vote and it's a 2000 page document. I probably read the initial version of the bill from front to back and was happy with it.

      There's your first problem. You don't actually read the bill. Between meetings with constituents, lobbyists, or other Reps; your committee hearings; hours long "working lunches"; working on your own legislation; and campaigning if you are up for re-election next year you are lucky if you have time to read 200 pages. If anything you read an executive summary provided to you, and chances are that summary was either written by a staffer/intern who didn't read it either or it was provided by lobbyists who "lent their expertise to" (read:wrote) the bill that your fellow Rep then introduced. That's how you get comments like Pelosi's "We have to vote for it to see what's in it" or the Republican's latest on Obamacare "It had some fundamental problems/repercussions that we couldn't see when we passed it so now we are hoping to roll it back after the next election." The system is designed so that Reps and Senators don't actually know what they are voting on, and really don't care.

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      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
  2. One important law by phorm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One important law that is needed, perhaps above all others, is something to prevent jamming unrelated bills (or perhaps just multiple bills) into a single law. Sure, you'd end up with more bits and pieces, but overall they should be more easily parsed than huge bills. Of course then gov't would still actually have to read this sh**, but hey...

  3. How are laws like this even legal? by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How are laws like this even legal? I doubt that even a single representative who voted on this bill read the entire bill. With a 2000 page bill, that is probably changing until minutes before it hits the house floor, there is no way that anybody could possibly know what's in it. They should keep the laws short and simple so that both the representatives and citizens can actually understand what the law means.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  4. So? Who did it? by DriveDog · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When something bad happens, we normally look for the guilty party or at least a scapegoat. Now we get "was hidden". Who hid it? What individual inserted CISA into the budget bill? Why don't all the major news outlets say "Rep. Smith inserted CISA into the budget bill"?

  5. This is not democracy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is a prime example why so called riders should be illegal. All it takes is one corrupt "owned" politician to surreptitiously slip in items that have been rejected by the majority of both the house and senate. This is not democracy, this one (or a small group) of self-serving criminals slipping something past the rest of the nation. If a bill is so poorly written, disgusting or reviled that it cannot stand on its own merits it has no business being "inserted" in anything but a garbage can.

  6. Re:And since our Legilators Rarely Read the Bills. by davester666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, a bunch of us were aware of it WAY before snowden. Of course, we were tagged with labels like "crackpot", "crazy", "delusional".

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