Some of the most powerful tech companies including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo, came out against the controversial CISA cybersecurity bill on Thursday, arguing that it does not protect users' privacy and would cause "collateral harm" to "innocent third parties."
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, due for consideration in the U.S. Senate later this month, is intended to improve cybersecurity by encouraging businesses to share information about cyberthreats with the U.S. government, also allowing companies to share personal user data with the government in exchange for immunity from regulators and the Freedom of Information Act, according to the Guardian.
The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a trade group representing the above tech companies and 21 others, published an open letter on Thursday voicing its concern, suggesting that the bill's language is vague and would remove safeguards designed to prevent companies from sharing consumer information without their permission.
"CCIA is unable to support CISA as it is currently written," wrote Bijan Madhani, policy counsel for CCIA. "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. In addition, the bill authorizes entities to employ network defense measures that might cause collateral harm to the systems of innocent third parties."
CCIA continued: "Current legal authorities permit companies to share cyber threat indicators with the government where necessary to protect their rights and the rights of their users, and should not be discounted as useful existing mechanisms."
President Barack Obama has already endorsed the measure, and the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Richard Burr, R-N.C., recently cited a breach at T-Mobile/Experian as proof that Congress should quickly pass CISA, reports The International Business Times.
But some in the Senate remain skeptical and cheered CCIA's opposition. "CCIA represents some of the biggest names in tech and their opposition to the current version of CISA is a shot in the arm for those of us fighting for privacy and security," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., CISA's most vocal opponent, said in a statement to the Daily Dot. "These companies understand it is untenable and bad for business to enact flawed 'cybersecurity' policies that infringe on users' privacy while doing little to prevent sophisticated hacks."
