@ACLU: #CISPA Is Dead (For Now)

The Senate will not take up the controversial cybersecurity bill, is drafting separate legislation

Sen. Jay Rockefeller says CISPA's passage was "important," but its "privacy protections are insufficient."

Sen. Jay Rockefeller says CISPA’s passage was “important,” but its “privacy protections are insufficient.”

CISPA is all but dead, again.

The controversial cybersecurity bill known as the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives last week, will almost certainly be shelved by the Senate, according to a representative of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

The bill would have allowed the federal government to share classified “cyber threat” information with companies, but it also provided provisions that would have allowed companies to share information about specific users with the government. Privacy advocates also worried that the National Security Administration would have gotten involved.

“We’re not taking [CISPA] up,” the committee representative says. “Staff and senators are divvying up the issues and the key provisions everyone agrees would need to be handled if we’re going to strengthen cybersecurity. They’ll be drafting separate bills.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., chairman of the committee, said the passage of CISPA was “important,” but said the bill’s “privacy protections are insufficient.”

That, coupled with the fact that President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the bill, has even CISPA’s staunchest opponents, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, ready to bury CISPA and focus on future legislation.

“I think it’s dead for now,” says Michelle Richardson, legislative council with the ACLU. “CISPA is too controversial, it’s too expansive, it’s just not the same sort of program contemplated by the Senate last year. We’re pleased to hear the Senate will probably pick up where it left off last year.”

That’s not to say Congress won’t pass any cybersecurity legislation this year. Both Rockefeller and President Obama want to give American companies additional tools to fight back against cyberattacks from domestic and foreign hackers.

[READ: Lawmakers Who Pushed CISPA Were ‘Doxed’]

But cybersecurity legislation in the Senate, such as the Cybersecurity and American Cyber Competitiveness Act of 2013, has greater privacy protections than CISPA does. Richardson says that bill makes it clear that companies would have to “pull out sensitive data [about citizens]” before companies send it to the government and also puts the program under “unequivocal civilian control,” something CISPA author Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., was unwilling to do.

Even if the Senate gets something done, Rogers and other CISPA supporters will likely have to compromise more than they’ve been willing to over the past year as Obama has made it clear he will veto legislation that doesn’t have more privacy protections.

“The way [Rogers] talks, [the House] has gone as far as they possibly can on privacy,” Richardson says. “I don’t know if that’s true and I’m not sure how they’ll respond when the Senate puts something back to them. But if they don’t figure out a compromise, they might not get any legislation at all.”

The commerce representative says that the Senate committee is “working toward separate bills” to improve cybersecurity, which are currently being drafted. But don’t expect these bills soon, as the Senate considers immigration, an Internet sales tax, the aftermath of the Boston bombing and the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control crisis in the wake of sequestration.

Richardson says she thinks it’ll be at least three months before the Senate takes a vote on any cybersecurity legislation.

“We need to be vigilant as the year moves on to make sure that whatever the next product is, it’s not CISPA-lite,” she says. “I think this is probably going to take the rest of the year.”

Cell Phone Location Tracking Public Records Request

In a massive coordinated information-seeking campaign, 34 ACLU affiliates are filing over 375 requests in 31 states across the country with local law enforcement agencies large and small that seek to uncover when, why and how they are using cell phone location data to track Americans.

Today, most people walk around with a tracking device in their purses or pockets – a cell phone. Location data from your cell phone can make it easy to get directions or locate the closest coffee shop. But it also makes it easy for your cell phone company to find you – whether through your phone’s built-in GPS or by noting your proximity to nearby cell towers. And that location data also says a lot about you – where you go, what you do, and who you know.    All too often, the government is taking advantage of outdated privacy laws to get its hands on this valuable private information by demanding it without a warrant. The public has a right to know how and under what circumstances their location information is being accessed by the government – and that is exactly what we hope our information requests will uncover.   Cellphone Tracking Map CHECK OUT OUR MAP!
Is Your Local Law Enforcement Tracking Your Cell Phone’s Location? » The requests seek information from local law enforcement agencies, including: 

  • whether law enforcement agents demonstrate probable cause and obtain a warrant to access cell phone location data;
  • statistics on how frequently law enforcement agencies obtain cell phone location data;
  • how much money law enforcement agencies spend tracking cell phones and
  • other policies and procedures used for acquiring location data.

  The information requests are part of the ACLU’s Demand Your dotRights Campaign, an effort to make sure that, as technology advances, privacy rights are not left behind. Learn More » Below is a complete list of the information the ACLU requested:. 

  • Policies, procedures and practices law enforcement agents follow to obtain cell phone location records
  • Data retention policies, detailing how long cell phone location records are kept, databases in which they are placed, and agencies (federal, state and local) with which they are shared
  • The use of cell phone location records to identify “communities of interest (detailing those persons who have called or been called by a target)” in investigations
  • The use of cell phone location records to identify all of the cell phones at a particular location
  • Law enforcement agencies’ use of “digital fences” (systems whereby law enforcement agents are notified whenever a cell phone comes within a specific geographic area)
  • The legal standard (e.g. probable cause, relevance) law enforcement agents proffer to obtain cell phone location records
  • Judicial decisions and orders ruling on law enforcement agencies’ applications to obtain cell phone location records
  • Statistics regarding law enforcement agents’ use of cell phone location records, including the number of emergency requests for which no court order was obtained
  • The form in which cell phone location records are provided (hard copy, through specific online databases)
  • Communications with cell phone companies and providers of location-based services regarding cell phone location records, including
    • company manuals, pricing, and data access policies
    • invoices reflecting payments for obtaining cell phone location records
    • instances in which cell phone companies have refused to comply with a request or order

MAP: Is Your Local Law Enforcement Tracking Your Cell Phone’s Location? »

ACT NOW: Tell Congress to update privacy laws to protect you from unwarranted location tracking by government agencies! »

State Dept. Cables? #WikiLeaks Documents? What? Where? - #CoverUp #BlackMail #Coercion #Lies

Last month, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the State Department’s failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the declassification of 23 leaked State Department cables. These cables have already been fully disclosed online by WikiLeaks and distributed by major national and international newspapers. The U.S. government has maintained that the cables are secret. As we’ve said before, the government’s struggle to ignore WikiLeaks has reached the point of absurdity.

Last week, we received the government’s initial response to our lawsuit; it demonstrates just how far they are willing to go to evade responsibility.

First, the government denies that we even asked for State Department cables in our FOIA request. Instead, they argue that we only requested what we claim are State Department cables. Of course, while insisting that the American people are not entitled to know whether the leaked cables are authentic, the government has simultaneously aggressively pursued the alleged source of the cables. As the ACLU’s complaint states:

To which the government responded:

The government also assured us that even if we had requested what are in fact State Department cables, those cables do not “describe federal government activity.” Even actual State Department cables “are often preliminary and incomplete expressions of foreign policy, and … they do not necessarily represent U.S. views or policy.” Some of these incomplete “expressions” of foreign policy that don’tnecessarily reflect U.S. views or policy include:

  • descriptions of interference with the Spanish investigation of CIA rendition flights and prosecution of Bush administration officials for torture of detainees;
  • urging Germany to drop arrest warrants for the rendition and torture of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German citizen;
  • attempts to pressure the Italian judiciary to drop international arrest warrants for the CIA’s kidnapping and rendition of Egyptian citizen Abu Omar in Milan;

diplomatic meddling in response to investigations of CIA rendition programs throughout Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland, and the Netherlands;

  • international admissions and negotiations regarding the use of drones throughout Pakistan and Yemen.

The message to the American public is: you don’t need to know if the leaked cables that the world has read are real. But even if they are real, the government won’t take responsibility for their contents. Americans don’t need to know if the State Department is spending our diplomatic capital in attempts to cover up and evade accountability for torture and rendition.

The government concludes with the following:

What the government calls “unusual circumstances” should not allow for further delay. Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act to make the government accountable to the American people. Eventually, the State Department will have to stop ignoring reality and begin to take responsibility for the embarrassments that WikiLeaks has brought to light.

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