Free Press Action Fund Condemns Senate Passage of CISA

WASHINGTON — The Senate today voted 74-21 to pass the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), legislation that offers blanket immunity to companies sharing vast quantities of their users’ private data with government authorities.

If CISA becomes law, it would permit these companies to monitor and then report to the government on a host of vaguely defined “cyber-threat indicators.” It would allow companies that hold huge swaths of our personal data — like health insurers, telecom providers and credit-card companies — to surveil the online activity of their users and share data with the Department of Homeland Security “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” This information would then be automatically shared with a number of other agencies, including the FBI and the NSA.

Free Press Action Fund Government Relations Manager Sandra Fulton made the following statement:

“CISA is a bad trade-off for Internet users. Letting companies violate the online privacy rights of their customers with impunity won’t make networks more secure. But it’ll give giant financial, insurance, health-care and communications companies a pass on protecting their users’ data, which is why many of them lobbied so hard in favor of this bad legislation.

“Despite what industry lobbyists claim, CISA doesn’t improve cybersecurity. And it creates enormous loopholes in longstanding privacy protections for consumers. It’s a surveillance bill that lets companies aggressively spy on Internet users and collude with government authorities without accountability.

“That not only poses a grave threat to the Internet, it undermines the individual privacy rights that are essential to the health of any functioning democracy.”