Talk about a provocative headline. Via a Huffington Post article written by Sabrina Siddiqui, Rep. Mike Rogers (the sponsor of CISPA) said “that most opponents to his controversial cybersecurity bill are teenagers in their basements.” Here’s the video:
Siddiqui goes on to note that the ACLU joins the basement-dwellers in their opposition to CISPA. Not to be flippant, but what national security initiative does the ACLU not oppose? Does their opposition really mean anything?
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The New York Times’ Somini Sengupta also reported on CISPA:
The White House on Tuesday threatened to veto a House bill that would allow private companies to share information about computer security threats with government agencies, signaling once again how difficult it is to balance civil liberties and security interests in the digital era.
. . .
A National Security Council spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden, on Tuesday described those as “a good faith effort,” but insufficient. Specifically, the administration said private firms should be required to try to “remove irrelevant personal information” when sharing cyber threat information with each other or with government agencies.
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I thought Sengupta’s line really hit it on the head; it’s extremely difficult to balance civil liberties and national security interests in the digital era. We hear about these cyber threats and then we read about how politicians participate in NSA/FBI simulations of a massive cyberattack which “opens their eyes,” and yet, we squabble over a cybersecurity bill that has been amended again and again.
Does anyone else think this CISPA debate looks like FISA before the Wall between law enforcement/intelligence came down? It took a terrible event to really expose the issues behind the Wall, and afterward the public and media were clamoring to understand why the federal government didn’t connect the dots. If someone proposed bringing down the Wall before 9/11, don’t you think there would be ferocious opposition to it? Of course. Unfortunately, 9/11 served as a terrible policy window to bring it down.
I see parallels here. I don’t mean to fear monger, but someday there could be a debilitating cyberattack on our country. If and when that day comes, people are going to ask why the federal government didn’t act. Then the policy window will open, the balancing between privacy and security will shift, and we’ll get a cybersecurity bill. But why wait for that attack?
Stewart Baker also wrote on the President’s veto threat for his Skating on Stilts blog. In particular:
What’s remarkable is that the President started this debate by asking for almost exactly what the House Intelligence Committee has delivered. Here is the Administration’s original legislative proposal on information sharing.
. . .
So the short version of this story is simple: The President says he will veto CISPA because it lacks features that he didn’t even bother to include in his own version of the same bill.
This is some of the flakiest policy making I’ve ever seen at such a high level, and it strongly suggests that the Administration just isn’t that serious about information sharing for cybersecurity.
This whole thing stinks, man. I shudder to think that a grand alliance between the basement dwelling teens, the ACLU, the neckbeards of reddit and a hypocritical Obama administration will kill our best shot at a cybersecurity bill.
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