Privacy Advocates Concerned As Senate Approves Controversial Cybersecurity Bill

Despite previous failures, Congress just keeps on churning through bills that propose to enhance digital security at the cost of digital privacy. The latest in the series sailed through the Senate with wide approval this week, kicking off another wave of privacy concerns.

What’s the bill?
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (S. 754), commonly called CISA. The Senate approved it this week by a vote of 74 to 21. (Five Senators did not vote.)

What’s it for?
The core idea behind CISA is to prevent cyberattacks through data-sharing. As we’ve seen over and over in the past couple of years, entities — both public and private — in the U.S. are not exactly on the ball with the whole “preventing hacks” thing. So CISA would create a mechanism streamlining the process of sharing user data for the purposes of enhanced security. Businesses would pass data related to potential threats along to the Department of Homeland Security, who would then pass it through to the NSA, FBI, and so on to ward against threats.

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