Ahead of Senate Vote, Edward Snowden Speaks Out to Stop CISA Surveillance Bill
Joining privacy rights groups in opposition to the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), Snowden says it is "not going to make us any safer."
@Snowden / Twitter
By Nadia Prupis / Common Dreams
As the U.S. Senate gears up for a vote on the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) on Tuesday, privacy advocates are galvanizing an 11th-hour push against the bill they say does nothing more than expand government spying powers.
A slew of digital rights groups including Fight for the Future and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with whistleblower Edward Snowden and outspoken CISA opponent Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), joined forces Monday night for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit, which has also come out against the bill. The session was the latest action by civil society groups, activists, and tech companies calling on Congress to reject CISA for its anti-privacy provisions.
“CISA isn’t a cybersecurity bill,” Snowden wrote during the Q&A. “It’s not going to stop any attacks. It’s not going to make us any safer. It’s a surveillance bill.”
Supporters of CISA—including Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.)—say the bill would make it easier for tech companies to share data in cases of security breaches and other digital attacks. But critics say there aren’t enough safeguards in place to protect user privacy and the bill only works to serve intelligence agencies in domestic surveillance operations.
“What it allows is for the companies you interact with every day—visibly, like Facebook, or invisibly, like AT&T—to indiscriminately share private records about your interactions and activities with the government,” Snowden wrote on Monday. “CISA allows private companies to immediately share a perfect record of your private activities the instant you click a link, log in, make a purchase, and so on—and the government with reward for doing it by granting them a special form of legal immunity for their cooperation.”
Fight for the Future campaign director Evan Greer said the Senate’s vote on Tuesday “will go down in history as the moment that lawmakers decided not only what sort of Internet our children and our children’s children will have, but what sort of world they will live in.”
The campaigns, which are being waged under the hashtag #StopCISA, urge senators to oppose the bill and protect civil liberties.
Greer added, “Every Senator who votes for CISA will be voting for a world without freedom of expression, a world without true democracy, a world without basic human rights. And they will be voting for their own removal from office, because the Internet will not forget which side of history they stood on.”
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The WikiLeaks whistleblower has now served seven years of her sentence, experiencing extraordinary hardship as a person seeking gender-reassignment treatment while imprisoned by the U.S. military.
Her 129-page document proposes "concrete" solutions to the rampant and unchecked violations of privacy and civil liberties by the U.S. government.
Under the guise of “cybersecurity,” the Senate passed a spying bill that “carves a giant hole in all our privacy laws and allows tech and telecom companies to hand over all sorts of private information to intelligence agencies without any court process whatsoever," writes Trevor Timm at The Guardian.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act failed after Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass government spying. But today it’s back, largely unchanged, and President Obama is expected to reverse his opposition to it.
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which includes no data-protection provisions, would set up a new network for private corporations to share customer data with nearly all levels of law enforcement and intelligence, including the National Security Agency.The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act would create a new network for companies to share customer data with law enforcement and intelligence agencies, including the NSA.
A year-and-a-half after Swartz killed himself because of pressure from felonies he faced over alleged “cyber crimes,” the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is set to give the government the power to collect and share content from emails, texts or other written communications without a warrant, ACLU adviser Gabe Rottman says.CISA is set to give the government the power to collect and share content from emails, texts or other written communications without a warrant, ACLU adviser Gabe Rottman says.
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