In a closed-door session, the House Intelligence Committee approved the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known as (CISPA, by an 18-2 vote. The bill is now headed to the House floor for a vote next week.

The committee met on Wednesday to discuss amendments to the bill, which is designed to enhance America's defenses against cyber threats by allowing more information on online attacks to be shared between the private sector and the government. Detractors of the bill, however, fear that to enhance security, the bill will sacrifice privacy, allowing companies to send user's private and identifiable information to the federal government, including military agencies like the NSA.

During the markup session, a set of six amendments introduced by Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), the authors of the bill, were approved, as reported by The Hill. The changes will require the government to strip personal information from the data they receive from private companies, and the government won't be allowed to use that information for "national security purposes." For the authors, the changes strike the right balance. "What we came up with, we think, is the right approach. It is the one bill out of everything you've seen on both sides of this great institution of the United States Congress that protects a free and open Internet and allows people to share cyber threat information to protect their clients, their business, their [personally identifiable information]," Rogers said after the markup. "It's been a work in progress."

"You can't get more oversight on making sure that people's personally identifiable information is protected than the way we structured it in this bill," he said.

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The committee, however, voted down other amendments, backed by civil rights advocacy groups, which were aimed at improving privacy protections. These were introduced by Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), the only two representatives to vote against the bill yesterday.

The privacy amendments rejected would have precluded the sharing of private information with the NSA and the Department of Defense, as well as required companies to strip identifiable information from data themselves — instead of leaving that task to the government.

The two opponents were disappointed by the changes adopted. "I think there are positive changes to the bill but they don't go far enough," Schiff told The Hill.

Schakowsky said in a statement that her amendments would have "required that companies report cyber threat information directly to civilian agencies and maintained the long standing tradition that the military doesn't operate on U.S. soil against American citizens."

The current legislation doesn't expressly require companies to share data with the NSA, but as revealed by Wired in 2006, this is something that has happened before and privacy advocates fear it could happen again.

CISPA already passed the House a year ago. But a timely White House veto threat, in part based on privacy concerns, effectively killed the bill, which was never picked up by the Senate.

Meanwhile, Internet freedom activists are ramping up their campaign to defeat CISPA, in an attempt to gather popular support like they did last year to defeat SOPA. The challenge they are facing this time around is that there is no consensus among tech companies in opposing the bill. In fact, even if 30,000 companies have expressed their opposition, there are many other tech giants who favor it, including Verizon, IBM, McAfee and Oracle. On their part, Microsoft has dropped its initial support, Facebook has recently given indications that it's not terribly in favor of it, but Google hasn't taken a stance yet.

UPDATE, 3:21 p,m.: The American Civil Liberties Union has expressed its disappointment with the vote yesterday. In a press release, the civil rights group complained that the bill still allows for companies to share private information with the NSA. In the release, Michelle Richardson, a legislative counsel with the ACLU, said that "the changes to the bill don’t address the major privacy problems we have been raising about CISPA for almost a year and a half."

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