USA: Cyber Security Bill is being prepared
While Snowden continues to leak information about the US government's spying activities, Congress is preparing to pass a cybersecurity bill that is supposed to stop the wave of hacker in American companies.
Of course, he seems to completely ignore the protests about privacy and individual liberties.
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted (307-116) to pass the Protecting Cyber Networks Act, a bill that aims to enable the sharing of data on cybersecurity threats between businesses and government agencies.
This new information-sharing system is designed to act as a real-time immune system against hacker attacks, allowing companies to warn each other, through the government, about attackers' tools and techniques.
Privacy advocates say the bill threatens to open a new channel of no return for surveillance of American citizens (and beyond). By granting surveillance licenses, companies essentially gain legal immunity to share their users' personal data with government agencies, including the NSA.
“The PCNA would significantly increase the National Security Agency’s (NSA) access to personal information, and authorize the federal government to use that information for thousands of other purposes unrelated to cybersecurity,” says a document signed by 55 civil liberties groups and information security experts. The groups that signed include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Human Rights Watch, and many others.
"The revelations of the past two years about the abuses of the intelligence community and oversight authorities in the field of the collection and use of individual information by Snowden demonstrate that the government goes beyond the law, especially when the language of the law is not clear,"
[RONA] fails to provide strong privacy protections or sufficient clarity about how measures can be taken, what information can be shared, and how that information can be used by the government.”
Data protection advocates have not given up and are calling on the Obama administration to impose a presidential veto, as promised in the Snowden era.
A new website called StopCyberspying.com , asking the US President to reconsider the PCNA, CISA, or any other bill that threatens to expand internet surveillance.
Source: secnews.gr
