CISPA Lives to see another day
Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, said he plans to re-introduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) with Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) this year.
Ruppersberger said his staff is currently working with the White House to smooth over the concerns it had with the bill last year. The White House issued a veto threat against CISPA last spring, saying the president’s top advisers would recommend that he veto the bill if it came to his desk.
“We’re working on some things…working with the White House to make sure that hopefully they can be more supportive of our bill than they were the last time,” Ruppersberger said.
So far, the Maryland Democrat said the discussions with the White House have been positive and “working pretty well.”
Civil liberties groups and privacy advocates launched online protests against the bill because they argued that it lacked sufficient privacy protections and would increase the pool of people’s electronic communications flowing to the intelligence community and the secretive National Security Agency (NSA). The White House shared similar concerns about the privacy protections in the bill and whether it would protect people’s personal information when companies share cyber threat data with the government.
Rogers and Ruppersberger argued that CISPA had sufficient privacy protections and even modified the bill to address some of the concerns from privacy advocates, who ultimately were not won over by the changes.