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The bill, which
would expand liability protections to companies that choose to
voluntarily share cyber-threat data with the government, must be
reconciled with two similar information-sharing measures that
passed the House of Representatives earlier this year. It
cleared the Senate by a vote of 74-21 with strong bipartisan
support.
The White House announced support last week for the Senate bill,
although it stated a desire for some revisions before it lands
on President Barack Obama’s desk.
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, is a
proposal that languished in the Senate for several years partly
because of privacy groups' concerns it would shuttle more
personal information into the hands of the National Security
Agency and other government spies.
But business interests, including the Chamber of Commerce, have
argued an information-sharing law is necessary to allow the
private sector to cooperate more closely with the government on
detecting and minimizing cyber threats without fear of lawsuits.
A round of amendments intended to strengthen some of the bill’s
privacy protections failed on Tuesday as the bill’s bipartisan
sponsors warned last-minute changes could upset the balanced
language that was the culmination of years of negotiations.
Skeptics of CISA have said it would do little to prevent
malicious breaches like the kind that crippled Sony Pictures
last year, which the Obama administration publicly blamed on
North Korea, or recent thefts of data from companies like
Target, Home Depot or Anthem Insurance.
Even some of the bill’s supporters have conceded the bill is a
small first step to shore up U.S. cyber defenses, which are
constantly under assault by hacking groups and foreign
nation-states like China and Russia, according to government
officials.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said on Tuesday that CISA
was “far too weak.”
The bill’s passage through the Senate was a defeat for digital
privacy activists who celebrated the passage in June of a law
effectively ending the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. call
metadata.
The curtailment of that program, which had been exposed in 2013
by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, represented the first
significant restriction of the U.S. government’s
intelligence-gathering capabilities since the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks.
(Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Peter Cooney)
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