Congress added some of the most controversial parts of the latest cybersecurity bill to its gigantic end-of-year “must-pass” omnibus spending package, including mandatory sharing of any consumer data it collects with the Internal Revenue Service, FBI and the National Security Agency.

Civil liberties experts said they were dismayed that Congress had used the late-night bill to pass some of the most invasive parts of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa).

“Once again, members of Congress are using the government funding bill to pursue their extremist agendas,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Sneaking damaging and discriminatory riders into a must-pass bill usurps the democratic process and is irresponsible.”

The House intelligence committee reportedly dominated discussion of the bill in conference and stripped it of what opponents, including Oregon senator Ron Wyden, described as already too-meager privacy protections. Language that would have prevented consumer financial data from being shared directly with the NSA, for example, is not in the final version of the bill.



Cisa would create a system for corporate informants willing to share their customers’ data with the Department of Homeland Security, which would then pass the information to other federal agencies, defined in the final text as the departments of commerce, defense (which oversees the CIA), energy, justice (the FBI), the treasury (which oversees the IRS), and the office of the director of national intelligence (which oversees the NSA).

In return, companies participating would be shielded from regulatory action related to the information they passed along and any Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the public to determine exactly what kind of user information was being handed over to the government.

The information-sharing program has been criticized as both inferior to the programs run by private industry and needlessly invasive – Lauren Weinstein, who has worked on network security since the dawn of the internet, said that the language would create a gigantic and vulnerable trove of information that likely would not ultimately make Americans any safer.

“We have the obvious case of Snowden marching out of the NSA with a thumb drive,” Weinstein said. “That suggests that there is not a culture of security and privacy established in the government yet. You have to have that before you even consider sharing the amounts of data this would cover, and that’s apart from the question of whether the information would be abused in the context of the legislation as written.”

Others, including Evan Greer of Fight for the Future, say that the bill is simply surveillance in sheep’s clothing. “It’s a disingenuous attempt to quietly expand the US government’s surveillance programs,” wrote Greer, who also noted that the bill had been stripped of any language that might protect consumers from passing their most private information directly to the federal government. “And it will inevitably lead to law enforcement agencies using the data they collect from companies through this program to investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate more people, deepening injustices in our society while failing to improve security.”

The omnibus bill now lifts a 40-year ban on exporting oil and includes tax cuts worth half a trillion dollars.