While Most Of The Rest Of The Internet Industry Is Fighting Against CISA, Facebook Accused Of Secretly Lobbying For It
from the this-is-a-concern dept
For the past few years, much of the internet industry had been mostly silent on CISA, or vaguely for it, mainly because it would provide them immunity from liability if they share too much information with the government. However, as more details have come out about CISA, making it clear that it's a surveillance bill, rather than any sort of cybersecurity bill, the internet industry has finally, mostly come out against it. It started with Salesforce.com, after people started protesting a letter it had signed saying it favored "cybersecurity" legislation, but without naming CISA. In response, Salesforce came out directly and said that it did not support CISA. Soon after that, the BSA (the Business Software Alliance, which now prefers to just be called "The Software Alliance"), which had put together the letter Salesforce signed, said that it did not support CISA (or any of the other cybersecurity bills that have been introduced). Soon after that, CCIA, which represents a bunch of internet companies, came out directly against CISA, saying:CCIA is unable to support CISA as it is currently written. 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.With that, the ball was rolling. Both Apple and Dropbox directly came out against CISA. Then Twitter, Yelp, Wikimedia and Reddit.
However, the folks at Fight for the Future, who have been working hard to stop CISA, are now claiming that they have it on good authority that Facebook is one of the only internet companies secretly lobbying in favor of the bill and is asking people to sign its petition to convince Facebook to back down:
This bill is toxic. The public hates it and tons of tech companies are against it, but Congress keeps trying to ram it through. Now that we know that Facebook lobbyists are working behind the scenes to get it passed, it makes more sense why Congress keeps coming back to it.This would seem to be very unfortunate if it's true, and hopefully Facebook reconsiders. While Apple, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn and others have been quite vocal in fighting back against government surveillance, Facebook has been much less involved in those fights -- despite the fact that it often has more information than those other players. Facebook seems increasingly out of step with the rest of the internet industry in making sure that protecting the privacy of their users against government surveillance is a top priority. Hopefully, the company changes its position on this.
Facebook’s chief Senate lobbyist, Myriah Jordan, worked as General Counsel for CISA's sponsor, Senator Richard Burr, right up until taking the job at Facebook. On her lobbying disclosures she lists “cybersecurity” as one of the issues she's been discussing with senators. These “revolving door” connections give companies more power and influence than ordinary people could ever have, and it’s part of the reason why companies like Facebook think they can get whatever they want out of Washington.
Several offices on the Hill have heard from Facebook that they support CISA. As much as we wish we could reveal our sources, we agreed not to (selective leaking is part of how the lobbying game works, unfortunately). But this information matches with everything we know about Facebook's love for CISA over the years. They backed the bill loudly before it was unpopular and then stayed silent as other big tech companies came out against it. We've asked them to state their position publicly, bu they have said nothing. Facebook has backed this from day one, and now they're the lone tech voice still working to make sure it passes.
Update: For what it's worth, Facebook is now denying the story, saying that it has not taken a position either for or against CISA (and doesn't seem interested in doing so either way). That still seems like an odd position to take given that most of the other companies in the industry have come out against the bill. And, in addition, I've now heard from others on Capitol Hill as well supporting the statements from Fight for the Future that Facebook is considered to be in favor of CISA, though it's not clear if the company has been actively lobbying for it.
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Filed Under: cisa, cybersecurity, lobbying, surveillance, tech industry
Companies: facebook
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Re: Facebook's denial
Given the bill stands to affect both Facebook and it's users to a significant level, 'No comment' isn't really an option here. If they were against it, they'd clearly say so, so by claiming not to have a position, all they're really doing is admitting that they are indeed for it.Subscribe: RSS
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Well... yeah
If Facebook has more info, then they also have more incentive to try and get immunity for 'sharing' it.
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Re: Well... yeah
It's no different than AT&T having monopoly powers years ago - in exchange the US government can intercept any phone call without a warrant.
US Congress - fighting terrorism because they're the real terrorists.
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Re: Well... yeah
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Re: Well... yeah
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Now that's pretty funny
Those poor, naive, ignorant losers at Fight for the Future actually think that a petition will cause sociopath Mark Zuckerberg to change his mind? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA
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Re: Now that's pretty funny
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YouProduct
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Re:
There is always a way. Whether it's a black-bag job to backdoor their backup servers or a sizable payoff to a well-placed network engineer or getting their own people hired in the auditing department that's supposed to stop this kind of thing, there is always a way. The data involved is too massive and too valuable to be left on the table.
So I guarantee you that Facebook et.al. are completely, absolutely, 100% 0wned by the United States government. They might also be 0wned in whole or in part by other governments -- certainly the Russians and the Chinese have both the motivation and the resources to accomplish that and it's an obvious move.
So trying to stop that is futile and silly. The only remaining question is whether or not they've allowed this to happen willingly, and clearly Facebook has.
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Re: Re:
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In character
I hope so too, but let's face it. This is Facebook we're talking about. Facebook has very little regard for the internet or its users, so I don't expect them to change their stance.
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Zucker Dirt
This douche-bag deserves to fall face first into the failed business dirt!
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Re: Zucker Dirt
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Re: Re: Zucker Dirt
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hardly surprising
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Re: hardly surprising
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Re:
(F)ace
(B)ook
(I)ncorporated... create your dossiers for us.
Think about it, and wake the phuck up, people.
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Re:
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Re: Re:
It's not as difficult as you might think. Let me explain at a brief and superficial level.
In the world of pattern recognition, we talk about "feature extraction". That's the process whereby we measure things, so if we were interested in classifying motor vehicles, one of the features we might extract is "number of axles". Another might be "number of wheels", and still another might be "number of doors".
The idea, of course, is to use those features to figure out what kind of vehicle we've got. But not all features are equally useful: if we're trying to tell the difference between a Mercedes sedan and a Toyota sedan, "number of wheels" won't help.
So the next step is "feature selection": what's actually useful? Which features will enable us to make decisions?
And the step after that is "feature weighting", because even if we've decided that there are 22 features useful for decision-making, they're almost certainly not all equally useful.
There is no doubt that by now extensive theoretical and experimental analysis has been carried out on the Facebook data corpus and that algorithms have been written which perform this process, at scale, and quickly. Facebook themselves have no doubt done this because processing the data in this fashion yields saleable output, and we all know that Facebook sells everything that it can to anyone with cash in hand. And any government in possession of Facebook's data has undoubtedly done the same thing -- with their own purposes in mind.
The combination of this approach with machine learning yields code that cuts right through the "5,000 friends" problem like it isn't even there.
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Re: Re:
How about analyzing private message metadata and photo facial recognition.
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It is no wonder that they keep resurrecting this legislation...
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Which leads me to ask who cares whether FB is for or against CISA? Their position or opinion should not and does not matter. They're gone in a few years anyway so these inquiries can be focused on other companies that matter.
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I am tempted to uninstall the Facebook virus
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Re: I am tempted to uninstall the Facebook virus
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Re: Re: I am tempted to uninstall the Facebook virus
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Congressional Acronym Misdirection
Complete
Internet
Surveillance
Act
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A better acronym
Codification of Internet Surveillance in America.
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Facebook and privacy don't go together
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Or..
Or, hopefully the public changes its position of the company. That would also prevent subsequent problems.
(Yes, I know, but I may dream.)
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No, Google absolutely has not been vocal in the fight against government surveillance.
In fact, Eric Schmidt said this:
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
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Re:
No, Google absolutely has not been vocal in the fight against government surveillance.
In fact, Eric Schmidt said this:
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Taking one stupid quote out of context from someone barely associated with the company any more doesn't erase what the company has been doing for quite some time on surveillance stuff. Google has been fighting. Not hard enough in my opinion (Apple, Twitter and Yahoo have done more), but Google has been deeply engaged in the push from what I've seen.
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Re: Re:
It doesn't matter. Google sits on far too much data for any intelligence agency on this planet to ignore. ALL OF THEM want to get their hands on it. Some of them have the ability to do so, and no doubt some of those have succeeded.
There's nothing that Google can do to stop this. They're helpless. They're up against adversaries with enormous budgets, large personnel resources, and expertise-in-depth. They're up against adversaries who can plant employees. They're up against adversaries who can craft custom hardware at the chip level. They're up against adversaries who can pull black-bag jobs against their executives and programmers and everyone else. They're up against adversaries who can and will lie, bribe, extort, cheat, blackmail, and anything else in order to get the job done.
So yes, Google can talk a good game and can even put its engineers to work trying to make it really happen. Won't matter. Every bit of data that Google has will be acquired.
They only way to avoid having that happen is not to collect the data. And Google won't do that because they can't do that.
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Re: Re: Re:
There is little to no reason to believe this is true. I do believe that the government can get access to a lot of targeted info, but the idea that *all* of it is acquired is unlikely to ridiculous.
As for the claim that there's nothing that can be done, I don't buy it. Encryption, done right, can work. Google *should* do a much better job allowing users to do end to end encryption for email, but the idea that everything Google has the government has is not realistic.
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Facebook's denial
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Re: Facebook's denial
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Facebook
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