You can read about the recent changes to CISPA—including why EFF continues to oppose the bill—in our recent analysis . We urge individuals who are concerned to speak out by calling their Congressional Representatives and then following up with an email .

Today, thirty-four civil liberties organizations sent a joint letter to Congressional Representatives urging them to continue to oppose the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). CISPA is a misguided "cybersecurity" bill that would provide a gaping new exception to privacy law. The House of Representatives is likely to vote on it on Wednesday or Thursday of this week. This means that there's little time remaining to speak out against this bill.

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Dear Representative:

Earlier this year, many of our organizations wrote to state our opposition to H.R. 624, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2013 (CISPA). We write today to express our continued opposition to this bill following its markup by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Although some amendments were adopted in markup to improve the bill’s privacy safeguards, these amendments were woefully inadequate to cure the civil liberties threats posed by this bill. In particular, we remain gravely concerned that despite the amendments, this bill will allow companies that hold very sensitive and personal information to liberally share it with the government, including with military agencies.

CISPA creates an exception to all privacy laws to permit companies to share our information with each other and with the government in the name of cybersecurity. Although a carefully-crafted information sharing program that strictly limits the information to be shared and includes robust privacy safeguards could be an effective approach to cybersecurity, CISPA lacks such protections for individual rights. CISPA’s information sharing regime allows the transfer of vast amounts of data, including sensitive information like Internet records or the content of emails to any agency in the government including military and intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency or the Department of Defense Cyber Command.

Developments over the last year make CISPA’s approach even more questionable than before. First, the President recently signed Executive Order 13636, which will increase information sharing from the government to the private sector. Information sharing in this direction is often cited as a substantial justification for CISPA and will proceed without legislation. Second, the cybersecurity legislation the Senate considered last year, S. 3414, included privacy protections for information sharing that are entirely absent from CISPA, and the Obama administration, including the intelligence community, has confirmed that those protections would not inhibit cybersecurity programs. These included provisions to ensure that private companies send cyber threat information only to civilian agencies, and a requirement that companies make “reasonable efforts” to remove personal information that is unrelated to the cyber threat when sharing data with the government. Finally, witnesses at a hearing before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed earlier this year that companies can strip out personally identifiably information that is not necessary to address cyber threats, and CISPA omits any requirement that reasonable efforts be undertaken to do so.

We continue to oppose CISPA and encourage you to vote ‘no.’

Sincerely,

Access

Advocacy for Principled Action in Government

American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

American Association of Law Libraries

American Civil Liberties Union

American Library Association

Amicus

Association of Research Libraries

Bill of Rights Defense Committee

Breadpig.com

Center for Democracy & Technology

Center for National Security Studies

Center for Rights

Competitive Enterprise Institute

The Constitution Project

Council on American-Islamic Relations

CREDO Action

Daily Kos

Defending Dissent Foundation

Demand Progress

DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Fight for the Future

Free Press Action Fund

Government Accountability Project

Liberty Coalition

Mozilla

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers

New American Foundation’s Open Technology Institute

OpenMedia.org

PolitiHacks

Reddit

RootsAction.org

Tech Freedom