American Civil Liberties Union

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.”   

Today we're launching a weeklong campaign called "Stop Cyber Spying Week" to draw attention to the massive civil liberties problems in H.R. 3523, better known as CISPA.

Washington is in the midst of debating something called “cybersecurity.” But that term actually includes several very separate and distinct problems that call for very different solutions. Not only does conflating them confuse the issue — it also has very distinct political consequences. So let’s unpack the separate meanings of the term.

1. Criminal and malicious online behavior
As every computer owner knows, internet security is a very real problem for individual households and businesses. The open architecture of computers and the internet has led to an explosion of innovation, collaboration, and creativity — but the very openness that has fuelled so much innovation has also made us vulnerable to viruses, spyware, and other forms of malware. These problems are endemic among home computers and among a surprising number of professionally managed institutional machines as well. Much of this is due to the failure to perform basic computer security.

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.