On April 13th, 2012, Joel Kaplan–Facebook's VP for U.S. Public Policy–wrote a note explaining why Facebook supports CISPA, the cybersecurity legislation waiting in the House. Noting that "a successful defense against bad actors . . . requires that we have timely information about cyber threats," Kaplan explained that it's currently a challenge for companies like Facebook to share threat information with other companies.
Accordingly, CISPA "would make it easier for Facebook . . . to receive critical threat data from the U.S. government . . . [and] would impose no new obligations on us to share data with anyone."
Kaplan recognized that civil liberties groups have come out against CISPA, mostly because companies could share sensitive personal information with the government. However, Kaplan dismissed these concerns and said that "Facebook has no intention of doing this and it is unrelated to the things we liked about [CISPA] . . . ."
Ultimately, Facebook wants legislation that "helps give companies like ours the tools we need to protect our systems and the security of our users' information . . . ."
The post instantly got hundreds of comments deriding CISPA and Facebook in general.
You can find that Facebook note here.
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