Senior Former Intelligence Official Admits That 'The Point' Of CISA Is Surveillance

from the of-course dept

Tue, Oct 27th 2015 6:20am — Mike Masnick

Senator Ron Wyden -- who has been fighting back against secret laws expanding surveillance for years -- made it clear months ago that CISA was really "a surveillance bill by another name." Of course, if you just read the bill it might not appear that way, because you need to understand how it works with a variety of secret orders and surveillance authorities -- along with secret interpretations of the law. We've tried to piece together how CISA is filling in a big missing blank in what the intelligence community needs to conduct broad warrantless domestic surveillance on internet users (something that it has been restricted from doing in the past few years).

Marcy Wheeler has uncovered another little tidbit -- buried in a CNN article all about CISA, in which the reporter speaks to a former senior US intelligence official:

"Would it give our spy agencies greater visibility? Definitely. That's the point," the official said.

Except, of course, the backers of the bill, Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have been basically shoving each other aside to insist that's not the point at all. They keep insisting that the bill has nothing to do with surveillance or the intelligence community and is just about domestic cybersecurity efforts, and that everyone's supposedly barred from doing more with it (until you look at the fine print, of course). Of course, it's possible that this is just a misstatement by the nameless former official, but it might also be a pretty clear admission of what most folks have been saying from the beginning. CISA is a surveillance bill, disguised to look like it's about "cybersecurity."

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: cisa, cybersecurity, fbi, nsa, surveillance

16 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Median Wilfred, 27 Oct 2015 @ 6:49am

FBI has something on them
the backers of the bill, Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have been basically shoving each other aside to insist that's not the point at all.

I am beginning to believe that the US "Intelligence Community" (a.k.a. Our Benevolent Overlords Who Really Do Know Better Than Us) have certain... information... on elected officials other than Jane Harman. Perhaps the Honorables Burr and Feinstein are in that unfortunate number.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 27 Oct 2015 @ 6:50am

Of course
This is only catching the tech sector up with ye telecoms of olde.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/29/us-telecom-immunity-ruling-idUSTRE7BS0Y720111229

The verdict is still out on whether CALEA II will be necessary or not, but don't be surprised if it shows up in the future.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/the_problems_wi_3.html

This is about shutting down avenues for legal opposition, enabling the surveillance to continue unimpeded indefinitely and over all communications methods.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 27 Oct 2015 @ 6:56am

>CISA is a surveillance bill, disguised to look like it's about "cybersecurity."

Well in order to do cybersecurity, you need surveillance. The two are not mutually exclusive. How else do you find out about attacks, targets, and attackers?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Groaker (profile), 27 Oct 2015 @ 7:11am

Re: Program abuse
So far the only capability that our Government has shown in cybersecurity is the collection of data into neat packages for crackers to fetch.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Just Another Anonymous Troll, 27 Oct 2015 @ 7:20am

Re:
By securing your system instead of spying on everyone without a warrant?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 27 Oct 2015 @ 7:37am

Re: FBI has something on them
Which makes these "honorable" elected officials more of a liability. If they have something that allows for an agency to threaten exposure of misdeeds/information in order to secure their support, they need to be removed.

Just give them their four leaf clover already
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 27 Oct 2015 @ 7:42am

Re:
Well in order to do cybersecurity, you need surveillance. The two are not mutually exclusive. How else do you find out about attacks, targets, and attackers?

This is about what's done with the surveillance output. Yes, watching your network for nefarious traffic is surveillance, shipping all your surveillance to the government is not secure. The most insecure systems on the planet are usually government systems.

For Cyber Security, the best approach is to watch for nasty packets, log them for a limited time (a few days, a week, so you can review if there's an incident). And then dump the history. Why pay for disk space if you don't need to.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 27 Oct 2015 @ 7:42am

Re: FBI has something on them
Do you want a coup? Cause this is how you get a coup!

Despite the joke, it's not really a joke. Intelligence agencies are often the constructs of scared little men & women. In a sick twist of fate, the people in power attempting to solidify that power wind up giving all of that power away to the agency they created. In the end that agency will always become the power itself while the ones setting up that power become artifacts of a puppet state.

Ill fate often waits upon the path we take to avoid it!

No government "For the People" should ever have an inward facing intelligence agency of any kind for any reason. It will only serve to displace its creators and subsequently crush its true king (the people).
[ link to this | view in thread ]
jakerome (profile), 27 Oct 2015 @ 7:59am

Retronym
The
Complete Internet Surveillance Act of 2015.

CISA
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 27 Oct 2015 @ 9:11am

Re:
Opening your network and attempting to access and store all outside traffic sounds like the exact opposite of security.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 27 Oct 2015 @ 9:29am

Just a little tip: It doesn't matter what Dianne Feinstein says, she is the living embodiment of Dolores Umbridge and should be treated as such.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 27 Oct 2015 @ 10:10am

It's not about surveillance. It's actually about ethics in cyber security legislation!
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 27 Oct 2015 @ 10:37am

The former official must have misspoken. CISA is obviously about security, not surveillance:

As every network security specialist knows, the best way to keep your data safe is to make dozens of copies of it and send it back and forth across the internet to various and sundry public and private organizations with unknown data retention policies and security practices.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Ninja (profile), 27 Oct 2015 @ 12:56pm

Re: Re:
Bingo. Except no, it would be too much of a hassle to have law enforcement do their jobs.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 27 Oct 2015 @ 1:15pm

Re: Re: FBI has something on them
Fair enough. Hopefully a coup is never a result as it will get worse as recent events have shown. If anything, these officials should uphold their oath (not to safety or the people but to the Constitution) regardless of their shady business dealings as they're no longer private citizens.

You violate your oath, out you go.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
tqk (profile), 28 Oct 2015 @ 2:06pm

Re: Re:
By securing your system instead of spying on everyone without a warrant?

The security wonks in our midst have been for some time pushing the idea that securing systems from intrusion is a waste of time, and instead we should be looking to secure the valuable data inside instead, just assuming badguys are going to get in. So, encrypted databases, greater permissions granularity, & etc.

I think it's pretty simplistic and based on the fact they've maybe never worked with anything but Windows.
[ link to this | view in thread ]