CISPA Zombie Bill Is Back, With Fewer Privacy Concerns…Maybe?

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says the new version of the controversial cybersecurity bill will include "tight limitation on what kind of information is shared."

This summer, when Edward Snowden dropped his bombshell about PRISM, the NSA's vast Internet spying program, the House had recently passed a bill called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Widely criticized by privacy advocates, CISPA aimed to beef up US cybersecurity by giving tech companies the legal freedom to share even more cyber information with the US government—including the content of Americans' emails, with personal information intact. CISPA supporters, among them big US companies such as Verizon and Comcast, spent 140 times more money on lobbying for the bill than its opponents, according to the Sunlight Foundation. But after Snowden's leaks, public panic over how and why the government uses personal information effectively killed the bill. Now that the dust has settled a bit, NSA director Keith Alexander is publicly asking for the legislation to be re-introduced, and two senators confirmed that they are drafting a new Senate version.

"I am working with Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) on bipartisan legislation to facilitate the sharing of cyber related information among companies and with the government and to provide protection from liability," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told Mother Jones in a statement. "The legislation will...still maintain necessary privacy protections." NSA's Alexander threw his weight behind this kind of bill in September: "If we can't work with industry, if we can't share information with them, we can't stop [cyber attacks]" he told the Washington Post.