House Taking Up Cybersecurity Bill

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The House will take up floor consideration of the Republican-backed,
and cable industry-backed, Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act
(CISPA) bill this week.

The bill was marked up in the House Intelligence Committee
last week and will be considered on the floor Wednesday and Thursday of this week.

CISPA is the latest incarnation of abill introduced in the last session by Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and ranking member C.A.
Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), and reintroduced in February.

CISPA passed in the House last year, but not the senate. The
White House threatened to veto it.

The bill has been amended to try to make it more palatable
to Democrats and others with concerns about online privacy and government
overreach, though online activists pushed back last week. Reddit cofounder Alex
Ohanian teamed with Fight for the Future on a video and petition calling on
Google, Twitter and Facebook to fight the bill, saying CISPA would "make
every privacy policy on the Web a total joke."

The amendments, adopted in the markup last week and signaled
earlier in the week to reporters in a press conference with Rogers and Ruppersberger,
include:

  1. "[An] amendment to make clear there is no
    new authority to allow companies to "hack back" against their attackers."[An] amendment to limit the use of information received by the private
    sector to only cyber security information.
  2. "[An] amendment to minimize and remove any personally identifiable
    information obtained from the private sector not critical to the cyber threat.
  3. "[An] amendment to strike the government's national security use
    provision, leaving four permissible uses: cybersecurity, cybersecurity crimes,
    protection from the danger of death or serious bodily harm, and protection of
    minors from child pornography.
  4. "[An] amendment to add roles for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board
    (PCLOB) and the individual agency privacy officers to provide additional
    oversight of the government's use of information received from the private
    sector under this bill."
John Eggerton
John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.