Late last Friday, the US Congress and President Obama signed into law the CISA Surveillance Law using very underhanded methods.
With it came the loss of numerous protections extremely important to internet privacy. To understand why the CISA surveillance law is bad for email privacy, we will go over some of the main points of the law and how it managed to be passed. Then, we will discuss some of the things we can do about CISA. Despite being law now, there are in fact some ways the CISA surveillance law can be circumvented and online privacy protected.
What is CISA?
CISA stands for Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which is a deceptive title used by the sponsors of the law to hide its real purpose. From the name, one would assume that CISA is a cybersecurity law, but in reality,
it is a surveillance law. In the past week, Congress has dropped all pretense that this is a cybersecurity law by quietly stripping away the privacy protections that used to be in the law, and expanding how the collected information can be used and shared.
CISA creates a massive legal loophole that allows the NSA to circumvent privacy laws. This means US companies can now share ANY information with the US government, bypassing privacy laws without legal consequences. Furthermore, all of this information is automatically shared with the NSA and there are no restrictions on how the NSA can use this data.
How did CISA get passed?
The CISA surveillance law has been hotly debated for over a year in the US.
Privacy groups, some corporations, and hundreds of thousands of private citizens have strongly fought against the law. It was deemed by Congress to be too controversial to pass. In order to get CISA approved, the law’s sponsors turned to very underhanded methods.
First, they attached the law to a
completely unrelated budget bill, which is a critical bill that must be passed immediately for the US government to continue to function. Then, they waited until Monday, December 14th, 2015 to
release the full text of the budget bill, which
contains over 2000 pages, and they buried CISA in near the end on page 1728. Finally, they set the vote to happen on Friday, December 18th, 2015.
This ensured that congressional representatives would have
less than a week to read the entire bill and there would not be sufficient time for public debate. Furthermore, by sticking it into a critical budget bill, the law’s sponsors virtually guaranteed that it would be passed. Lastly, to minimize the fallout, the vote was scheduled for the last Friday before Christmas, so that by the time president Obama signed it into law, it would be too late to make it into that day’s news. Just like that,
a second Patriot Act has become law without any public outcry. This is how democracy is undermined, and we should be outraged.
