Congress Passes PATRIOT Act II In Secret

[Contumacious]

Taking Advantage of the fact that the typical American is as smart as a door knob:

Congress Slips CISA Into a Budget Bill That’s Sure to Pass

In a late-night session of Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced a new version of the “omnibus” bill, a massive piece of legislation that deals with much of the federal government’s funding. It now includes a version of CISA as well. Lumping CISA in with the omnibus bill further reduces any chance for debate over its surveillance-friendly provisions, or a White House veto. And the latest version actually chips away even further at the remaining personal information protections that privacy advocates had fought for in the version of the bill that passed the Senate.

“They took a bad bill, and they made it worse,” says Robyn Greene, policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute.

CISA had alarmed the privacy community by giving companies the ability to share cybersecurity information with federal agencies, including the NSA, “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” That means CISA’s information-sharing channel, ostensibly created for responding quickly to hacks and breaches, could also provide a loophole in privacy laws that enabled intelligence and law enforcement surveillance without a warrant."

 

[g5000]

Here is the text of the Senate version of CISA which passed earlier this year: Text - S.754 - 114th Congress (2015-2016): Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015

The area of concern:

(1) IN GENERAL.—The procedures developed and promulgated under subsection (a) shall—

(A) ensure the Federal Government has and maintains the capability to share cyber threat indicators in real time consistent with the protection of classified information;

(B) incorporate, to the greatest extent practicable, existing processes and existing roles and responsibilities of Federal and non-Federal entities for information sharing by the Federal Government, including sector specific information sharing and analysis centers;

(C) include procedures for notifying, in a timely manner, entities that have received a cyber threat indicator from a Federal entity under this title that is known or determined to be in error or in contravention of the requirements of this title or another provision of Federal law or policy of such error or contravention;

(D) include requirements for Federal entities sharing cyber threat indicators or defensive measures to implement and utilize security controls to protect against unauthorized access to or acquisition of such cyber threat indicators or defensive measures;

(E) include procedures that require a Federal entity, prior to the sharing of a cyber threat indicator—

(i) to review such cyber threat indicator to assess whether such cyber threat indicator contains any information that such Federal entity knows at the time of sharing to be personal information or information that identifies a specific person not directly related to a cybersecurity threat and remove such information; or

(ii) to implement and utilize a technical capability configured to remove any personal information or information that identifies a specific person not directly related to a cybersecurity threat; and

(F) include procedures for notifying, in a timely manner, any United States person whose personal information is known or determined to have been shared by a Federal entity in violation of this Act.

We are supposed to trust the Federal government to remove any personal information from data which is given to them by private entities that is not related to detection and elimination of a security threat.

Your health information, credit card data, porn site subscriptions, bulletin board forum registrations, etc.

And if the Federal government accidentally shares your personal information when they shouldn't have, they will be kind enough to inform you.


Senator Burr (R-NC) expects us all to bleev this.

That's funny. When I filled out a change of address form at the US Post Office, I started receiving junk mail from local business owners at my new address within a week of my arrival. Junk mail addressed to me, including one from a vet who magically knew what kind of dog I had.

Upon investigation into this mystery, I discovered the federal government had sold my personal information, including my new address, to the private sector before the ink was dry on my change of address form.

The thing was, I was told I was not even supposed to know this was going on.