On April 17th, 2012, Brendan Sasso reported for The Hill on CISPA, the cybersecurity bill that has gotten a whole lot of press lately. According to the article, the White House somewhat criticized CISPA when National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden released the following statement:
While information sharing legislation is an essential component of comprehensive legislation to address critical infrastructure risks, information sharing provisions must include robust safeguards to preserve the privacy and civil liberties of our citizens. Legislation without new authorities to address our nation's critical infrastructure vulnerabilities, or legislation that would sacrifice the privacy of our citizens in the name of security, will not meet our nation's urgent needs.
The statement didn't explicitly mention CISPA, but it did refer to information sharing legislation that lacks mandatory security standards for critical infrastructure systems. For context, Senate Democrats put out a proposal (the CSA) that calls for mandatory security standards for critical infrastructure systems. Consequently, the CSA also came under scrutiny from privacy and civil liberties groups for its information sharing provisions. Nearly all of the cybersecurity bills floating around have some sort of information sharing provision, so each is vulnerable to an attack on those grounds.
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CISPA looks less and less like SOPA with each passing day.
The Hill reported that Google has been working with Republican lawmakers on fine-tuning CISPA. Although Google hasn't publicly come out in support CISPA, its behind the scenes consulting suggests that it's not absolutely opposed to CISPA like it was for SOPA. Google's backing of the anti-SOPA protests was instrumental to SOPA's eventual defeat.
Also, add Intel to the list of CISPA supporters.
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