CISA: the dirty deal between Google and the NSA that no one is talking about

The Hill ^ | July 29, 2015 | By Evan Greer and Donny Shaw

[Brad from Tennessee]

One of the things that civil liberties activists like to lament about is that the general public seems to care more about Google and Facebook using their personal data to target advertising than the government using it to target drone strikes.

The reality is that both types of abuse are dangerous, and they work hand in hand.

It’s hard to find a more perfect example of this collusion than in a bill that’s headed for a vote soon in the U.S. Senate: the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA.

CISA is an out and out surveillance bill masquerading as a cybersecurity bill. It won’t stop hackers. Instead, it essentially legalizes all forms of government and corporate spying.

Here’s how it works. Companies would be given new authority to monitor their users -- on their own systems as well as those of any other entity -- and then, in order to get immunity from virtually all existing surveillance laws, they would be encouraged to share vaguely defined “cyber threat indicators” with the government. This could be anything from email content, to passwords, IP addresses, or personal information associated with an account. The language of the bill is written to encourage companies to share liberally and include as many personal details as possible.

That information could then be used to further exploit a loophole in surveillance laws that gives the government legal authority for their holy grail -- “upstream” collection of domestic data directly from the cables and switches that make up the Internet.

Thanks to Edwards Snowden, we know that the NSA, FBI, and CIA have already been conducting this type of upstream surveillance on suspected hackers. . .

[Talisker]

Our Congress at work, “doing no evil.”

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

I often wonder how secure they could make computers if our government didn’t force them to leave backdoors open.

[EternalVigilance]

Bump.

[The Antiyuppie]

“I often wonder how secure they could make computers if our government didn’t force them to leave backdoors open.”

All of this would be dreamland for Stalin and Beria; surveillance equipment is expensive. Here, the people being spied upon actually buy and maintain their own equipment.