Tuesday, August 04, 2015

The bill is headed to a vote in the US Senate today.

Homeland Security admits Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act raises concerns while corporations and data brokers lobby for bill as it returns to Senate

August 3, 2015
By Sam Thielman

...The latest (click here) in a series of failed attempts to reform cybersecurity, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa) grants broad latitude to tech companies, data brokers and anyone with a web-based data collection to mine user information and then share it with “appropriate Federal entities”, which themselves then have permission to share it throughout the government.

 Minnesota senator Al Franken queried the DHS in July; deputy secretary of the department Alejandro Mayorkas responded today that some provisions of the bill “could sweep away important privacy protections” and that the proposed legislation “raises privacy and civil liberties concerns”....

Who is getting paid off?


...Data brokers are anxious to avoid losing the ability to aggregate vast quantities of personal data - the sale and licensing of consumer databases is a lucrative practice, as web advertising booms and TV advertising becomes more sophisticated....

...If the bill were to pass and enough of those companies were to cooperate with any given agency, the amount of information floating free within the federal government could easily extend to credit card histories (collected by data miners at Argus), lists of goods purchased (aggregated from customer loyalty cards by companies including Acxiom and Experian), and healthcare records (tracked by insurers)....