What is “CISPA”? CISPA stands for The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, a network and Internet security bill written by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) (H.R. 624). The bill purports to allow companies and the federal government to share information to prevent or defend against network and other Internet attacks. However, the bill grants broad new powers, allowing companies to identify and obtain “threat information” by looking at your private information. It is written so broadly that it allows companies to hand over large swaths of personal information to the government with no judicial oversight—effectively creating a “cybersecurity” loophole in all existing privacy laws. Under CISPA, what can a private company do? Under CISPA, any company can “use cybersecurity systems to identify and obtain cyber threat information to protect the rights and property” of the company, and then share that information with third parties, including the government, so long as it is for “cybersecurity purposes.” Whenever these prerequisites are met, CISPA is written broadly enough to permit your communications service providers to share your emails and text messages with the government, or your cloud storage company could share your stored files. Right now, well-established laws like the Cable Communications Policy Act, the Wiretap Act, the Video Privacy Protection Act, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act provide judicial oversight and other privacy protections that prevent companies from unnecessarily sharing your private information, including the content of your emails. And these laws expressly allow lawsuits against companies that go too far in divulging your private information. CISPA threatens these protections by declaring that key provisions in CISPA are effective “notwithstanding any other law,” a phrase that essentially means CISPA would override the relevant provisions in all other laws—including privacy laws. CISPA also creates a broad immunity for companies against both civil and criminal liability. CISPA provides more legal cover for companies to share large swaths of potentially personal and private information with the government. Does CISPA do enough to prevent abuse of the law for copyright enforcement? No. Early versions of CISPA included language that specifically mentioned intellectual property, but that was taken out after significant outcry from the Internet community that the language could be used as a copyright enforcement bill similar to SOPA. (Great job, Internet community!) source: https://eff.org/cybersecurity-bill-faq
Posted on: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 20:22:47 +0000
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