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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."
Why is anyone surprised?
...It will slide through and pass without difficulty.
Huzzah...
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
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?
This crap is typical. First, you have a 2,000 page document that nobody has read. Second, it's full of crap that would never pass on it's own and can barely stand to be in a room with itself because of the stink. No wonder nobody thinks congress is doing a good job, they're all a bunch of crooks and flim flam artists.
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...
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.
The point of this article is that it already happened. They passed that bill last night. And since the Senate already approved it months ago it just needs a presidential signature I believe. And at this point, if the President hasn't already signed it, he'd be really sticking his neck out by not signing it.
Is it too much to hope for that once this bill makes it way to the Senate, the usual Congressional gridlock will kick in and prevent it from moving forward? Am I placing too much faith in our Congress's incompetence?
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"?
[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!"
in the Senate for passing bills the public doesn't like. All you can do is vote the politicians who let you down out of office. Sadly, even that has become extremely difficult to do because the power of our vote has been severely eroded.
Lawrence Lessig wanted to do something about it (the power of our vote) but he was excluded from the election process by the entrenched Democratic Party and Mass Media, who are quite happy with the status quo. He most likely still would not have gotten very far (stepping down as President after achieving his one goal was sort of a downer), but at least the conversation would have happened and Americans would begin to understand just how unrepresentative the government has become.
This sort of thing happens all of the time, usually out of public notice, and will continue.
Not only is cramming omnibus bills a scummy practice, but doing so right before everyone leaves for a holiday to add pressure not to read things and just pass them is double scummy.
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.
Don't worry. I'm sure my senators won't vote for it.
Well shit they both voted for CISA in the senate last time. I guess Senator Klobuchar and Senator Franken do hate our freedoms. All that is really left is to find out if my freedom hating shit stain of a Representative (that would be you Kline you ignorant bastard) voted for it in the house.
Time to offend someone
No, the spending bill needs to be voted on by both the House and the Senate. So nothing passed yet.
You'd think they would oppose this but then again they're just Republicans with a Libertarian fetish....there's always the line item veto.
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.
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.
No, the spending bill needs to be voted on by both the House and the Senate. So nothing passed yet.
Correct. But since it is a budget bill, it can pass the senate with a simple majority, and does not require the normal 60 votes for cloture. This is an underhanded way of passing something that is not legitimately part of a budget.
If nobody read it, how do you know it doesn't do what you want?
And if nobody read it, and you've been told it is bad... do you not see any problem with believing what these people are telling you?!
I suspect a bunch of people read it, and they're trying to manipulate the critics into sounding like idiots by using flamebait tactics. They probably even have an aide that calls up some idiot bloviator from the "other side" to tip them off that they just slipped something in that "nobody has read" to get the blog posts going.
And if nobody in Congress ever does read it, they won't succeed at creating a compromise bill, and it will never reach the President anyways. If nobody reads it, there are few worries.
This is an instance you wish line item veto law wasn't struck down back in '98.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
41 states have that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
43 states allow their governors to veto specific items in bills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In 1996 the Republicans gave Clinton line-item veto. The Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional, because Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution says the president either signs or vetoes the bill, not -part- of the bill. It needs to be done as a constitutional amendment.
No, don't work that way. The House and the Senate must pass identical bills before it can go to the president. The fact that the House amended this means the Senate must pass the amended bill--however, the betting is that they probably will.
No, a bunch of us were aware of it WAY before snowden. Of course, we were tagged with labels like "crackpot", "crazy", "delusional".
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
ha ha. The US got Harpered.
The last Canadian PM was infamous for creating a massive 'budget' document, with bunches of other unrelated laws, then pushing it through parliament.
I guess free trade goes both ways.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Sadly, I expect the President will sign it.
In this case he really should use the one power left to a lame duck President and use the line item veto. He could strike out the CISA stuff and leave the rest of the funding intact. The question would be if he would actually do it, but we all know the answer to that is most likely no.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
why do you have to go and insult bats that way?
How hard is it to define the scope at the start, then have all legislation following stay within those parameters?
I think any "lawmaker" that pulls these maneuverings - inserting legislation too far outside the intended scope of the bill - should be subject to censure, fines, and felony charges. The only defense would be to try to convince a bipartisan committee that you had a legitimate reason for injection, apart from bribes, handouts, contributions, kickbacks, and special favors of course.
If there are no penalties and no systems to steer the cows of Capitol Hill effectively, then the abuse will continue to run rampant.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
Not quite right. This budget bill is getting voted on by both the House and the Senate - to "keep the government running" so nobody is going to veto it - for this little piece.
The president supports all this surveillance legislation - he probably had a hand in getting it rewritten (to the surveillance establishment's desires) and inserted into the Omnibus spending bill in the first place.
In this case he really should use the one power left to a lame duck President and use the line item veto. He could strike out the CISA stuff and leave the rest of the funding intact. The question would be if he would actually do it, but we all know the answer to that is most likely no.
Presidents do not have a line-item veto power. Presidents can only veto the entire bill, which is why Congress habitually tries to add contentious items to "must-pass" bills.
Interestingly, line-item veto was one of the very few differences between the US Constitution and the Confederate Constitution.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
A whole bunch of crap gets stuck into the omnibus bill. It gives them cover on some things and in other ways represents a compromise between the parties. Both parties wanted to pass CISA despite it fucking the American people (i.e. letting businesses conduct mass surveillance and just happening to turn that over the government to be used for any purpose government wants without liability and I believe with no time limit for data retention).
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
High time to abandon the two party system, at least in terms of Congress.
Dude, the leadership in the US government has been pulling this shit for years. Think about it. Which government do you think is more likely to have come up with underhanded tactics first? Probably not Canada.
All bills should be clean with no "extras" inserted under cover of darkness.
Of course, if we had an actual budget, we wouldn't be talking about this particular bill, but the country hasn't had a real budget in years. Continuing resolutions and last minute fixes are no way to run a country.
Chances of such an amendment? Realistically - zero. Unless the states do it in a Constitutional Convention, there's no chance a corrupt Congress and President would go for it.
It wouldn't have been useful here. The line item veto was extremely limited:
``Sec. 1021. > (a) In General.--Notwithstanding the provisions of parts A and B, and subject to the provisions of this part, the President may, with respect to any bill or joint resolution that has been signed into law pursuant to Article I, section 7, of the Constitution of the United States, cancel in whole-- ``(1) any dollar amount of discretionary budget authority; ``(2) any item of new direct spending; or ``(3) any limited tax benefit;"
So a section of the law that authorizes allows or requires activity, but does not fund it is not covered by the old line item veto. The president also had to show that the veto would directly reduce the deficit, not hurt national interests and not impair any government functions.
It was one of those laws that politicians are very fond of passing. They can talk up how great they are for passing it and giving the government the tools to save the country from whatever crisis, fear or worry they are pumping up to get votes out of people, while still being almost completely useless in reality.
The solution is to not allow riders to any bills, but especially not to budgets.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
He's not insulting bats. He's insulting their shit.
Ok, bat byproducts then
Not quite right. The stop-gap spending bills are to "keep the government running," and the Omnibus is to agree to terms to stop having to fund things temporarily.
Temporary funding is much cleaner, since there is little value in temporary rules changes.
If the Omnibus sucks, it can be vetoed or get stuck in the reconciliation committee and government won't shut down without separate refusal to pass temporary spending bills.
Surely you meant:
Hurray for the confederacy?
In all seriousness, line-item vetoes probably aren't a good idea. Well, maybe they could be. But there's a bigger issue.
How I'd fix things...
1. 12 year term limits in Congress. Can be split... 6 in the Senate, 6 in the House. Prevents career "congressmen".
2. Get rid of gerrymandering. Mandate that districts must be square-like and/or contain cities or counties. I think Iowa does it right. City and county borders could be used but must still stay true to the concept of square-like if it extends outward from said border.
3. Mandate that bills be single-subject only. Pork is allowed if it's just spending only. Spending bills do not necessarily have to be single-subject. In other words, you cannot bury the creation of laws in a spending bill, but you can spend money on pork projects if it's within a bill creating new laws. Although, we do still have the problem of quid pro quo.
4. Public financing of campaigns for the federal level.
5. Any additions to bills must be accompanied by the person's name or be held invalid.
Yes, and contra the summary, it hasn't even passed the House yet. They just announced that a deal has been struck and released the text. But it's doubtful they'd make the announcement if they weren't certain they has the House votes. Then it will go back to the Senate. But note that CISA was already passed in a separate provision in the Senate, so it's doubtful this would be a reason to deny passage of the whole thing in the Senate.
I mean has no one heard of echelon?
No, a bunch of us were aware of it WAY before snowden. Of course, we were tagged with labels like "crackpot", "crazy", "delusional".
to be fair, being correct and having a few screws loose are not mutually exclusive. however, hats off to the CIA for putting a satellite in orbit that can steal your thoughts. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Some countries have formal legislation that says that bills relating to budget or administrative matters of government can only contain text relating to budget and administrative matters of the government.
That would go a long way to solving some of the bullshit that comes out of the USA system of government.
It would be better if it went even further and said that the content of a bill can only be related to what is written on the bloody title.
Another difference was the inability for states to say no to slavery. They *had* to allow slavery. So the states had less States Rights in the CSA.
I completely agree, but we don't have those rules in the US. This leads to all sorts of abuses.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yup. Line item veto, president gets one six year term, states have slightly more control over transport on waterways, and surprise, slavery is now constitutionally mandated. I think there might be one more change I'm forgetting, but otherwise, that's it.
It's funny when people start going on about 'states rights' and 'heritage not hatred' and 'slavery had nothing to do with it,' despite being shown the CSA Constitution, and the Statements of Succession from six of the original succeeding states that clearly state 'because slavery.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.