American Civil Liberties Union

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday marked up CISPA, the controversial cybersecurity bill that allows companies to share their customers' sensitive internet information with each other and the government. The bill's sponsors and corporations are not only declaring victory, but aggressively arguing that all privacy and civil liberties problems have been solved.

This couldn't be further from the truth.

We have flagged four general categories of problems in CISPA that have to be fixed before it is passed, and the markup only substantially fixed one of them:

The Propellerheads may have been talking about fashion trends when they sang that "to me it seems quite clear that it's all just a little bit of history repeating." But that sentiment rings loud and true today when talking about the privacy-busting cybersecurity bill CISPA.

Leaders of the House Intel Committee reintroduced CISPA with the same privacy flaws as last year. While they suggested at its unveiling that they worked with the privacy community and addressed our concerns, they didn't. This is the same bill, with the same problems.

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?