[NewsPoster]

The White House has responded to the 2013 version of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) bill heading to the House floor for a vote. National Security Council (NSC) spokesperson Caitlin Hayden issued a statement saying that "[the White House believes] the adopted committee amendments reflect a good-faith effort to incorporate some of the Administration's important substantive concerns, but we do not believe these changes have addressed some outstanding fundamental priorities" and intimated that the President would veto the bill as it stands.

Hayden did remark that the administration would continue to work with Congress to draft cybersecurity legislation, stating that "we continue to believe that information-sharing improvements are essential to effective legislation, but they must include privacy and civil liberties protections, reinforce the roles of civilian and intelligence agencies, and include targeted liability protections."

The bill was debated behind closed doors, and passed through the House Intelligence Committee yesterday after very few amendments were made. The exact text of the bill, even pre-amendment, has not been made public. Changes made to the bill require the government to redact personal information from the cyber threat data collected by companies and provided to the government, in addition to the removal of a vague provision in the bill allowing the government unfettered access to the information for "national security purposes."

This year's version of CISPA has the same goals as the 2012 version -- the bill is aimed at streamlining the process that currently prevents governmental and private-sector sharing of information about malicious source code, ongoing attacks, and other internet-based threats. The goal is information-sharing in real-time, ostensibly to aid US commerce and government forces in preventing and stopping attacks. Critics of the bill are concerned with the bypassing of legal privacy protections, as well as giving a large amount of collectible data about Internet users to the National Security Agency for use as it sees fit.

[iBricking.com]

Would the definition of CISPA be at all important to this story?

[Charles Martin]

Yeah, it wouldn't have killed them to put a sentence or two in, but the links in the story (particularly the second one) cover what CISPA is pretty well, so you could just click those ...

[Mike Wuerthele]

If you got to the last paragraph, it does discuss what the bill is for.

If you're referring to the fact that I didn't include what the acronym stands for, that is an omission that I will fix posthaste.

[danviento]

Given how the executive is has been so open and straightforward when it comes the information of private citizens (see recent example: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/item/14790-mo-dept-of-revenue-collecting-citizen-data-and-sending-it-to-dhs) I'm SURE there's nothing at all nefarious in it aims behind CISPA... No, not at all.

[Charles Martin]

You mean the legislative branch. That is the branch that drafted, and attempted to pass this bill last year and is attempting it again this year. The executive branch (by which you mean the President and his administration) opposed the bill last year and still oppose it now.

The link you refer to is from a whack-job site (Missouri has biometric information on all citizens? ORLY?) and refers to the *state government* of Missouri, which -- last I checked -- is not part of the executive branch of the federal government. Nice try, but I think the tinfoil hat needs to be adjusted slightly to the left a bit ...

[danviento]

Chasm, I thought the site gave a fairly bland, straight-forward statement of ongoing events in our state legislature (currently before the senate) and a lawsuit that has garnered much attention in the state. Honestly, I haven't vetted the site as a whole, but the information there matches all local news coverage I've heard to this point. Now they're to the stage of assigning culpability for just how many county offices have been scanning in gun permits, birth certificates, etc. and uploading them to and out-of-state server. Hello database of who owns what guns. All funded by your friendly DHS a la big-sis Napolitano. Surely that third party wouldn't pass that on the the program's funder...

And in case your forgot NSA, DHS and all those entities that ENFORCE the law fall under the executive. Sorry, but as sad as it is, with this current crop, what would normally be conspiracy theory shows all the signs of being an almost-certain reality.