WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 (UPI) — The Senate passed a controversial cybersecurity bill designed to battle cyberattacks by increasing information-sharing between the government and businesses.
The bipartisan Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, passed with a vote of 74 to 21. The bill has been criticized by privacy advocates as the solution to a non-existent problem.
The Senate bill took about four years to pass, causing the main feature of the legislation — agreements allowing the government and companies to share information — to seem obsolete when compared to the high level of sophistication computer hackers have achieved since the bill’s introduction.
The legislation allows corporations to share suspicious activity on privately owned networks without fear of litigation if personal data is inadvertently released. Whether privacy laws inhibit the amount of shared information is doubted by some. The sheer volume of data the CISA law proposes sharing would require machines with filtering algorithms, increasing the chance personal data could be released and hampering security.
Critics and several advocates of the bill say it does not do enough to combat cybercrime. The White House offered qualified support for the bill, and Senate Minority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), D-Nev., also supports it but has called it “far too weak.”
“We must do more to protect ourselves against this cyberterrorism,” Reid said.
Electronic Frontier Foundation said the bill is “fundamentally flawed due to its broad immunity clauses, vague definitions and aggressive spying authorities.”
“The passage of CISA reflects the misunderstanding many lawmakers have about technology and security. Computer security engineers were against it. Academics were against it. Technology companies, including some of Silicon Valley’s biggest like Twitter and Salesforce, were against it. Civil society organizations were against it. And constituents sent over 1 million faxes opposing CISA to Senators,” EFF said in a statement. “With security breaches like T-mobile, Target, and OPM becoming the norm, Congress knows it needs to do something about cybersecurity. It chose to do the wrong thing.”
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