With a resounding vote of 74-21, the Senate passed the controversial CISA bill yesterday. Senator Bernie Sanders voted against it while the other Senate presidential candidates did not vote at all.
We have to go across the pond to The Guardian to get a realistic report of the privacy giveaway.
Under the vague guise of “cybersecurity”, the Senate voted Tuesday to pass the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa), a spying bill that essentially carves a giant hole in all our privacy laws and allows tech and telecom companies to hand over all sorts of private information to intelligence agencies without any court process whatsoever. Make no mistake: Congress has passed a surveillance bill in disguise, with no evidence it’ll help our security.
All that is needed for companies to hand over huge swaths of information to the government is for it to contain “cyber threat indicators” – a vague phrase that can be interpreted to mean pretty much anything. Your personal information – which can include the content of emails – will be handed over to the Department of Homeland Security, the agency supposedly responsible for the nation’s cybersecurity. From there the information can be sent along to the NSA, which can add it to databases or use it to conduct even more warrantless searches on its internet backbone spying (which once again, a judge ruled last week could not be challenged in court because no one can prove the NSA is spying on them, since the agency inevitably keeps that information secret).
There were barely any actual cybersecurity experts who were for the bill. A large group of respected computer scientists and engineers were against it. So were cyberlaw professors. Civil liberties groups uniformly opposed (and were appalled by) the bill. So did consumer groups. So did the vast majority of giant tech companies. Yet it still sailed through the Senate, mostly because lawmakers - many of whom can barely operate their own email - know hardly anything about the technology that they’re crafting legislation about
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2016 election is turning out to be one of the most important elections in US history. So many issues are coming to the forefront including the existential threat of climate change . It has never been more important that we get this election right. We don't have time to waste on status quo candidates.
Sanders' stance on the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act in its current form aligns him with privacy advocates and makes him the only Democratic presidential candidate to stake out that position, just as cybersecurity issues loom large over the 2016 election, from email server security to the foreign-policy implications of data breaches.