Obama signs cyber security law as part of omnibus spending bill

Obama Signs Cybersecurity Law In Spending Package

On Friday, the president signed a $1.1 trillion spending bill into law to fund the federal government through the upcoming fall and included a controversial cyber security bill in spite of criticism from lawmakers and privacy advocates that it will be ineffective and let broader surveillance.

The House on Friday voted for the omnibus spending bill in a 316-113 vote, and the Senate afterwards gave its stamp of approval with a 65-33 majority.

The White House is “pleased” that Congress provided a final form of the Cyber Security Information Sharing Act in the spending bill, a senior government official tells U.S. News in an email. The House and Senate passed different versions of the bill recently, which aims to help stop breaches of consumer data by providing legal protections to incentivize companies to imply information about threats recommended to their networks with the government and other organizations.

“The president has long called on Congress to pass cyber security information-sharing legislation that will help the private sector and government share more cyber threat information by providing for targeted liability protections while carefully safeguarding privacy, confidentiality and civil liberties,” the Obama official says.

Congress included a number of other bills as riders on the must pass spending package, prompting President Obama to hint that Democrats compromised on this particular provision.

“I’m not wild about everything in it…but it is a budget deal,” Obama said during a press conference on Friday.

Not all Democrats compromised for the attachments to the spending package deal. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said in an interview that she voted against it, as it included the arguable cyber security bill that she called “a surveillance tool,” without having sufficient protections for information privacy.

“This so-called ‘cyber security legislation’ was inserted into a must-pass Omnibus at the 11th hour, without debate,” she said. “The protective measures that such a bill should have — including those I believe the Constitution requires — were removed.”

Supporters of the spending bill included Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who actually said in a statement that the improvement of the cyber security act “restricts the government’s use of cyber information to cyber security purposes and specific instances of major harm to people or the economy.”

“In short, this is a strong bill that takes an important first step to address a significant drain on our economy and threat to our national security,” Feinstein said.

The Center for Democracy and Technology was less hopeful about the privacy protections in the bill and was among 50 digital rights groups that wrote correspondence to Congress ahead of the vote, opposing the inclusion of the bill in the spending package.

The latest law only gives legal safety to companies sharing data with the Department of Homeland Security; however, it could still enable law enforcement officials to directly access customer data, in accordance with a Center for Democracy and Technology writing. The advocacy group’s experts, Greg Nojeim and Jadzia Butler, submitted the analysis criticizing that the bill doesn’t do enough to avoid the collection and retention of consumer data that’s irrelevant to a cyber security research.

“The bill allows the president to later designate other ‘appropriate’ civilian federal entities as information sharing portals, leaving room for scenarios in which companies would share — with full liability protection — information derived from Internet users’ communications directly with federal entities such as the FBI and other agencies primarily concerned with law enforcement surveillance, not cyber security,” they said.

Organizations are already sharing information regarding their networks with the government, so the new law is not likely to help prevent future theft of consumer information, says Ben Johnson, an ex-analyst for the National Security Agency. Echoing concerns voiced by some other technologists, Johnson advocates more focus on internet security habits and a better usage of existing information sharing to safeguard networks.

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