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CISA Surveillance Bill Hidden Inside Last Night's Budget Bill (engadget.com)
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."
[Congress is] all a bunch of crooks and flim flam artists.
And yet, when someone who isn't a career politician runs for office, everyone shouts "anyone but him!"
Sadly, I expect the President will sign it. Looking over the last few years, the changes -read erosions- in privacy laws have been shocking. Even that is probably not correct; I suspect the government has been doing this for decades, only since Snowden are we even aware of it.
No, it will have to go through another round of negotiation between the House and Senate because they didn't pass it as its own bill. Once the joint committee decides they both agree on what the combined result is, then it goes to the President. It is quite possible for the Senate to still block this. Unlikely.
The President can easily veto this if he wants to, because everybody already knows that Congress plays these games at that the President might have to smack them down. The President has over double the approval rating of Congress, after all. History proves that the American people will rightfully blame Congress for not passing a clean budget when needed.
As to the complaints, it is sad that the most prominent complaint people can think of is that it will "allow companies to share user info with the government." That makes it sound like this law does nothing. Companies own the data they collect about their users in the US, and they already are allowed to share it with the government when they decide to. If that is the best complaint people have, why should I care? Why do people who claim to care, claim to care? Because it will let things that already happen, continue to happen in the same way? What??!
The linked engadget article author doesn't know. First they claim the full text of the bill was included, then in the next paragraph it talks about there being differences. Indeed, they link to an article that if they had read, they would know it wasn't the "full text" but rather an alternate text. The House and Senate have actually both already passed versions of this bill. The Senate version had a lot more protections, and was weaker than the older House bill. This House version is further from the Senate version than their last one. As a bill on its own, it has no meaning. This will not impact the negotiations with the Senate over a compromise in any positive way.
This is probably more of an attempt by the House to submarine the budget deal. Expect the joint committee on the budget bill to toss that part out, since the Senate version of the budget bill didn't have that stuff. It can only go directly to the President if they pass the same bill. Otherwise, they have to sit down with each other and figure out what they're actually sending.