CISPA Passes House in Surprise Vote

This just in: the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) was voted in by the House of Representatives yesterday. From Forbes:

“In an earlier-than-expected vote Thursday evening, the House of Representatives voted 248 to 168 in favor of the bill, which was originally designed to allow more sharing of cybersecurity threat information with government agencies.

The legislation has drawn the ire of legislators, civil liberties groups, security practitioners and professors, and hundreds of thousands of petitioners, who say the bill tramples over users’ privacy rights as it allows Web firms like Google and Facebook to give private users’ information to government agencies irrespective of other laws that protect users’ privacy. ‘It’s basically a privacy nightmare,’ says Trevor Timm, a lawyer and activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ‘CISPA would allow companies to hand over private data to the government without a warrant, without anonymity, with no judicial review.’

But even before it passed, the House voted to amend the bill to actually allow even more types of private sector information to be shared with government agencies, not merely in matters of cybersecurity or national security, but in the investigation of vaguely defined cybersecurity “crimes,” “protection of individuals the danger of death or serious bodily harm,” and cases where that involve the protection of minors from exploitation.” (As House Passes CISPA, The Fight Is Just Beginning) 

For a closer look at the legislation, watch this video from Bloomberg Law:

(Vague Definitions in CISPA Raise Concerns of SOPA 2.0) 

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