CISPA Passes Markup Phase, But It Doesn't Look Like Much Was Fixed

from the still-a-bad-bill dept

As expected, CISPA passed the House Intelligence Committee today after a closed markup session. The vote was 18-2, and according to Tony Romm at Politico, all of the amendments that were backed by the original authors of the bill were adopted. If that's the case, we're talking about a bunch of changes that sound nice but don't accomplish much, such as dropping the "national security" provisions while broadening the definition of cybersecurity to encompass almost anything, requiring the government to remove personal information from shared data (once it's already in the hands of the government), and explicitly preventing companies from using data they receive for marketing purposes (which seems to go against previous insistence that the information shared would only be highly technical threat data).

CISPA is expected to go to the full house for a vote next week. As we get a closer look at the bill in its latest state, we'll do a more detailed analysis — but as it stands there's little reason to believe that any of the core problems have been fixed (and we're still waiting for someone to explain in clear, specific terms why this bill is needed at all).

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Filed Under: cispa, cybersecurity, house intelligence committee