American Civil Liberties Union

Over the last few months, more than 50,000 ACLU supporters signed our petition to the president urging him to veto CISPA if it made it to his desk. Not only did the president hear your calls – yesterday, he answered them with a resounding win for your privacy and civil liberties and threatened to veto CISPA, the dangerous privacy-busting cybersecurity bill.

The president's veto threat echoed many of our concerns, and those that he raised last year when he threatened to veto CISPA 1.0. We have long warned that CISPA threatens Americans' privacy and civil liberties by allowing for companies to share our private information, like our internet records and the content of our emails, with the government. Yesterday's veto threat makes it clear that in spite of recent amendments, CISPA still fails to adequately protect our privacy. As the veto threat states:

Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) made the argument last week that the privacy community’s significant concerns with CISPA, the privacy-busting cybersecurity bill, don’t stem from actual problems with the bill language, but rather from a misunderstanding of the bill itself. Speaking on behalf of himself and his co-sponsor, Representative Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), he told The Hill, “We feel that the bill clearly deals with privacy, that the checks and balances are there, but [we] know there's still a perception and we're still trying to deal with that.”   

Privacy protection, and the debate about whether to house information-sharing programs in a civilian or military agency, dominated three congressional hearings on cybersecurity this week.

In separate hearings Tuesday in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Armed Services Committee, leaders of the intelligence community called cyberattacks the greatest threat to the U.S. at this time—but admitted that the kinds of catastrophic attacks imagined by reporters and cyber experts were only a "remote" possibility in the near future.

UPDATE: Due to a winter storm approaching Washington, D.C., tomorrow's House Homeland Security Committee hearing on cybersecurity has been postponed for a later date.

As Congress debates cybersecurity legislation, one of the most significant questions legislators are tackling addresses where to house an information sharing program that would allow the private sector to hand over Americans' most private online information to the government: in a civilian or a military agency?