White House Petition Against CISPA Gets Over The 100,000 Signature Threshold

Privacy

from the good-sign dept

Yet another White House petition has made it over the 100,000 signature mark, which is necessary to get a response. This one is asking the White House not to support CISPA, arguing that the terms are too broad, and the possibility of abuse is simply too high. To date, the White House has actually been rather cool on CISPA, preferring an approach that actually does include some privacy protections (but, also one that has a few more mandates for companies). Just last week, DHS boss Janet Napolitano gave a speech in which she suggested that CISPA did not do enough to protect privacy — and made it even more clear during Q&A, in which she said of CISPA:

“There were no privacy protections built within it and it resided almost all of the cyber information monitoring responsibilities within the NSA, which of course is part of the military.”

Of course, some of this is a turf battle. CISPA gives more power to the Defense Department (which the NSA is a part of). The approach favored by the White House gives more power to Homeland Security.

Either way, this would make it easy for the White House to quickly come out in support of the petition, but still say that “something needs to be done” on cybersecurity — but exactly what that is still fairly murky. There have been a number of rumors that CISPA supporters have been “negotiating” with the White House, and that could mean tradeoffs that allow a bad bill to get through. This is something that needs to be watched carefully.

Filed Under: cispa, petition, privacy, signatures