Cybersecurity Bill Nears Crucial Senate Vote

Burr and Fein­stein packed eight of the oth­er pro­posed amend­ments in­to their man­ager’s amend­ment, leav­ing the rest to re­ceive in­di­vidu­al votes. Burr said that he and Fein­stein de­cided those amend­ments im­proved their bill and that they had agreed to op­pose the rest.

The co-spon­sors also ad­ded six changes that were not a part of the un­an­im­ous-con­sent agree­ment, a spokes­man for Fein­stein said Tues­day.

“Let’s end this pro­cess in a mat­ter of days,” Burr said on the Sen­ate floor. “We’ve pro­posed to vote on every amend­ment.”

But when the In­tel­li­gence Com­mit­tee chair­man asked for un­an­im­ous con­sent to vote on the bill and its amend­ments on Thursday, he was stopped by Sen. Ron Wyden, a lead­ing crit­ic of CISA. Wyden said one of the amend­ments—a change put for­ward by Sen. Shel­don White­house that would in­crease the crim­in­al pen­al­ties for hack­ing—would “sig­ni­fic­antly ex­pand a badly out­dated Com­puter Fraud and Ab­use Act.”

A group of se­cur­ity ex­perts and civil-liber­ties or­gan­iz­a­tions wrote an open let­ter Tues­day op­pos­ing the White­house amend­ment, which they say would “al­ter the CFAA in dan­ger­ous and un­pre­dict­able ways.” They say the change would fur­ther put a damper on le­git­im­ate com­puter re­search and would ex­pand pen­al­ties for low-level com­puter crime.

Burr urged Wyden to re­con­sider and al­low every amend­ment to re­ceive a vote. “If we can’t move for­ward with a pro­cess like that, then it’s dif­fi­cult to see how in a reas­on­able amount of time, we can com­plete this agenda,” he said.

Wyden’s op­pos­i­tion to CISA at large, which largely stems from his worry that the bill in­cludes in­ad­equate pri­vacy pro­tec­tions, is shared by pri­vacy ad­voc­ates and civil-liber­ties or­gan­iz­a­tions, as well as a grow­ing num­ber of tech com­pan­ies. Prom­in­ent tech as­so­ci­ation CCIA—which rep­res­ents Google, Face­book, Amazon, and oth­ers—came out against the bill last week, as in­di­vidu­al com­pan­ies like Twit­ter, Yelp, and Wiki­me­dia also voiced their op­pos­i­tion.

But their call to op­pose CISA is countered by groups like the U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce and the Fin­an­cial Ser­vices Roundtable, which have been act­ively lob­by­ing to pass a piece of le­gis­la­tion they say is es­sen­tial to strength­en­ing cy­ber­se­cur­ity for the private sec­tor and gov­ern­ment both.

If the Sen­ate’s cy­ber­se­cur­ity bill were to pass, it still would have to be aligned with two sim­il­ar—but not ident­ic­al—in­form­a­tion-shar­ing bills that passed the House earli­er this year.