Question To Ask Anyone Who Supports CISA: What Breach Would It Have Stopped?

from the simple-questions dept

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff is uncomfortable about the cyberthreats to this nation -- which just took place where millions -- MILLIONS! -- of Americans had their privacy hacked into. God only knows what the consequences of that are. And the other side has decided to object to proceeding with a bill that passed through the Intelligence Committee by a vote of 14 to 1. This is disgraceful.

When will Senators realize that NONE of the breaches (OPM, Sony, Anthem, Home Depot, etc.) would have been stopped is #CISA was law? — Robyn Greene (@Robyn_Greene) August 4, 2015

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We've asked this before and no one answered. But with the faux "cybersecurity" CISA bill back on track for another vote, it's time to ask the question again:? This is important, because many of the defenders of CISA keep pointing to things like the OPM hack as an example of why we need "cybersecurity regulations." Just yesterday, Senator John McCain used various recent high profile hacks as proof of why we need such a bill:But as policy counsel at the Open Technology Institute, Robyn Greene, recently noted on Twitter, none of the recent hacks would have been stopped if CISA was law.It seems like a fairly important question, especially when politicians are pointing to those and similar hacks or data breaches as examples of why we must pass CISA. Yet they can't explain how the law would have stopped those breaches (because they can't, because it wouldn't have).John McCain wants to talk about "disgraceful"? Isn't it more disgraceful to point to an attack that this bill would not have helped with as a key argument for why this bill needs to pass?This is some pretty serious hand-waving on the part of the politicians. Of course, the truth is that they simply don't understand the details enough to know what they're doing. They just hear from surveillance/law enforcement types saying that we "need cybersecurity legislation" and then they hear about these breaches and they immediately connect the two. Yet, they don't know what the law really does or why it's needed, and certainly don't understand how breaches happen or what it would take to prevent them (if that were even possible). So they just say "well, cybersecurity!" as if that's good enough.It's not.The changes brought about by CISA could have a pretty serious impact on our privacy and security and if Congress is going to pass it by pointing to these breaches, they shouldbeto explain how the law would have helped to stop any of those breaches. We'll wait.

Filed Under: breach, cisa, cybersecurity, hack, john mccain