Tech Giants Remain Weary Of CISA Bill

Last week, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which represents a group of major telecom and eCommerce companies, released a blog post stating it is “unable to support” the current version of the heavily debated Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) bill.

CISA will soon hit the Senate floor, but has garnered a great deal of scrutiny along the way.

If passed into law, the bill will offer expanded legal liability protections to companies sharing data in the hopes that American businesses will be less hesitant in the future to share information about security breaches with each other and government agencies as soon as possible.

But CISA opponents have remained vocal about the consequences of requiring companies to share their data with the NSA, mainly in the form of a loss of civil liberties.

“CISA’s prescribed mechanism for sharing of cyber threat information does not sufficiently protect users’ privacy or appropriately limit the permissible uses of information shared with the government,” Bijan Madhani wrote in the CCIA blog post. “In addition, the bill authorizes entities to employ network defense measures that might cause collateral harm to the systems of innocent third parties.”

CCIA’s members include Silicon Valley mainstays such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo, as well as telecom companies like Sprint and T-Mobile, eCommerce giants Amazon and eBay, and Netflix and Microsoft, The Hill reported last week.

“Members of Congress should pay attention: Nobody wants this bill,” Evan Greer, campaign director for digital rights group Fight for the Future, told The Hill after the CCIA announcement Thursday (Oct. 15). “Not the public, not security experts and not even the industry it’s supposed to protect,” Greer added.

Just last month, the anti-CISA movement turned its attention toward companies like Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce and Symantec, which, according to some, had previously “betrayed” billions of people by signing a letter endorsing the surveillance legislation.

For more on the digital identity ecosystem, click here to take a look at our Identity Tracker, which helps identify the issues and trends that arise around the digital identity ecosystem.

To check out what else is HOT in the world of payments, click here.