Along with dozens of other civil liberties organizations, Freedom of the Press Foundation has signed on to two letters strongly opposing the dangerous “cybersecurity” bills making their way through Congress and expected to be voted on sometime in the next week. The bills are little more than new surveillance powers wrapped in a cheap disguise, and you can read the full letters that describe the bill’s deficiencies here and here.

If passed, the bills will adversely affect all Americans’ privacy, but they have particularly critical consequences for journalists and whistleblowers, so we wanted to highlight those concerns that the letters did not fully cover.

First, as Politico’s Josh Gerstein reported on Monday, the bills “could create the first brand-new exemption to the Freedom of Information Act in nearly half a century.” The bills aim to allow private companies to share large swaths of private information with the government with no legal process whatsoever, essentially carving a giant hole in the country’s myriad privacy laws. But worse, the proposed FOIA exemption would prevent the public from ever being able to find out what type or amount of information these companies handed over.

Gerstein explains the multiple ways the bills attempts to cut off transparency and accountability: