White House Says It's Still Unhappy With CISPA, But Stops Short Of Veto Threat

from the better-than-nothing dept

Ever since CISPA passed the markup phase, people have been waiting to see how the administration would respond to the changes. Today, we got the official statement from the White House:

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 Administration seeks to build upon the productive dialogue with Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Ruppersberger over the last several months, and the Administration looks forward to continuing to work with them to ensure that any cybersecurity legislation reflects these principles. Further, we believe 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.

Though it doesn't raise the possibility of a veto, and even avoids explicitly taking a position of support or opposition, it serves as a fairly clear indication that the administration will not be supporting CISPA. Nevertheless, it's a little disappointing in its meekness.

Whenever someone spends that many words acknowledging the "good faith" of their opponent and boasting about "productive dialogue", it's a good sign that neither of those things are true. As we noted earlier, the amendments that were adopted during markup do not just fail to address the issues, they raise serious questions about just how much "good faith" has really been involved in this debate on the side of those who are pushing for the legislation. The dialogue, much like the one with CISPA last year, tends to go a lot like this:

Opponents: We are concerned that the bill will be abused in the following ways...
Supporters: No, we're not going to do those things.
Opponents: Good, but the language still makes it a possibility. You should re-write it to be more clear.
Supporters: Okay, we've rewritten it with a more detailed list of restrictions and exceptions.
Opponents: But these exceptions are all for exactly the things we were worried about in the first place.
Supporters: Sure, but we're not going to do those things.

The truth is, there's little evidence of any real effort to address the concerns of privacy and civil liberties advocates, the administration, or the general public. The markup session in which the final changes were adopted was closed to the public, and the responses from the bill's supporters when pressed on these issues have been somewhat less than comforting. Moreover, we shouldn't even be in the final stages of drafting legislation to solve a problem that nobody has clearly described in the first place. It's good that the White House is not giving CISPA any support, but here's hoping they go a step further and make their opposition to this whole broken approach to cybersecurity legislation explicit.

Filed Under: cispa, cybersecurity, white house

White House Orders Federal Agencies To Require More Open Access To Not Just Research, But Data

from the big-news dept

I have issued a memorandum today (.pdf) to Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication. As you pointed out, the public access policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health has been a great success. And while this new policy call does not insist that every agency copy the NIH approach exactly, it does ensure that similar policies will appear across government.

In addition to addressing the issue of public access to scientific publications, the memorandum requires that agencies start to address the need to improve upon the management and sharing of scientific data produced with Federal funding. Strengthening these policies will promote entrepreneurship and jobs growth in addition to driving scientific progress. Access to pre-existing data sets can accelerate growth by allowing companies to focus resources and efforts on understanding and fully exploiting discoveries instead of repeating basic, pre-competitive work already documented elsewhere. For example, open weather data underpins the forecasting industry and provides great public benefits, and making human genome sequences publically available has spawned many biomedical innovations—not to mention many companies generating billions of dollars in revenues and the jobs that go with them. Going forward, wider availability of scientific data will create innovative economic markets for services related to data curation, preservation, analysis, and visualization, among others.

Filed Under: data, federally funded, open access, research, white house

White House Declares It Has 'Broad Powers' When It Comes To Cyberattacks

from the well,-of-course dept

That decision is among several reached in recent months as the administration moves, in the next few weeks, to approve the nation's first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyberattack. New policies will also govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States and, if the president approves, attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code - even if there is no declared war.

Filed Under: administration, cyberattacks, cyberwar, powers, white house

White House, Tiring of Death Stars And Deportation Requests, Ups 'We The People' Signature Threshold From 25,000 To 100,000

from the 4chan-says:-challenge-accepted! dept

Filed Under: petitions, white house

Official White House Position: We're Not Building A Death Star

from the but-star-destroyers-are-on-the-way dept

"The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn't on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:

-The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We're working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
-The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
-Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

"Even though the United States doesn't have anything that can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, we've got two spacecraft leaving the Solar System and we're building a probe that will fly to the exterior layers of the Sun."

Filed Under: death star, humor, petition, white house

Anonymous Launches White House Petition Saying DDoS Should Be Recognized As A Valid Form Of Protest

from the if-you-have-to-ask-what-a-valid-form-of-protest-is... dept

With the advance in internet techonology, comes new grounds for protesting. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), is not any form of hacking in any way. It is the equivalent of repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a webpage. It is, in that way, no different than any "occupy" protest. Instead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website to slow (or deny) service of that particular website for a short time.

Filed Under: anonymous, ddos, protest, white house