Wednesday 4 November 2015

Our Editorial: Cybersecurity bill threatens privacy

The U.S. Senate voted last week to further enable the government’s efforts to collect the personal data of its citizens.

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act encourages businesses and government agencies to share information that might relate to cybersecurity threats, hackers or other malicious Internet users by giving immunity to the companies for sharing the often personal or sensitive information.

The legislation tramples already endangered privacy rights and other Fourth Amendment protections while giving companies and all government agencies new spying powers. And it won’t stop most cyber attacks.

The language in the bill that defines a threat is overly broad and too vague. There are almost no qualifiers limiting what can be shared among private entities and “any government agency,” if it’s considered a threat or an action to defend cyber safety.

Further, the bill doesn’t require companies to scrub personal data from information they’re sharing with one or more government agencies.

In fact, the Department of Homeland Security said it was concerned about the bill’s failure to mandate scrubbed information, and worried it would be forced to “contribute to the compromise of personally identifiable information by spreading it further.”

The department also explained that private companies sending vague threats to multiple government agencies will only complicate the systems now in place to deal with cybersecurity attacks. For the full article click here



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