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December 19th, 2015 
Awake Goy 
On Friday, Congress passed a $1.15 trillion omnibus spending package
to continue funding the federal government, which included an already
defeated, and extremely controversial cyber security bill, that was
inserted into the spending package as a means of assuring its passage. ~ Jay Syrmopoulos
In spite of this massive revelation and horrific blow to privacy, the
mainstream media remains mum. While many outlets are covering the
passage of the spending bill, they are completely omitting anything
about CISA.
The New York Times, for example, broke
the story Friday morning about Congress passing the omnibus measure.
However, they conveniently left out any mention of CISA.
Aside from the tech sites who know about the dangers of this measure, the entire realm of mainstream media is choosing to remain silent.
The Cyber
Information Sharing Act (CISA), quietly pushed back in 2014 before being
shut down by civil rights and privacy advocates, was added into the
Omnibus Appropriations Bill by House Speaker Paul Ryan as a means
circumventing rampant opposition to the anti-privacy legislation.
The CISA legislation, which Rep. Justin Amash called “the worst anti-privacy legislation since the USA PATRIOT Act,” has now been passed by Congress and will be signed into law by President Obama as part of the government spending package.
Advocates of the CISA provisions say their aim is to help prevent
cyber threats, but critics say that the legislation essentially gives
corporations legal immunity when sharing consumers’ private data about
hacks and digital breaches with the Department of Homeland Security.
According to a report by Wired:
It creates the ability for the president to set up
“portals” for agencies like the FBI and the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence, so that companies hand information directly to
law enforcement and intelligence agencies instead of to the Department
of Homeland Security.It also changes when information shared for
cybersecurity reasons can be used for law enforcement investigations.The earlier bill had only allowed that backchannel use of the data for
law enforcement in cases of “imminent threats,” while the new bill
requires just a “specific threat,” potentially allowing the search of
the data for any specific terms regardless of timeliness.
Originally, the CISA anti-privacy legislation was shelved after a
public outcry against the bill, but corporations soon realized the bill
would provide them with legal immunity for sharing customers’ private
data with the government and began a renewed effort to pass CISA.
And miraculously, even in defeat, a bad bill became worse, and a crisis became an opportunity.
“They took a bad bill, and they made it worse,” Robyn Greene, policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute, told Wired.
“They’ve got this bill that’s kicked around for years and had
been too controversial to pass, so they’ve seen an opportunity to push
it through without debate. And they’re taking that opportunity.”
By including CISA into the government’s overall spending package,
it meant that for anti-privacy legislation to be defeated the spending
bill had to also be defeated, which would have meant a government
shutdown beginning next week.
“Unfortunately, this misguided cyber legislation does
little to protect Americans’ security and a great deal more to threaten
our privacy than the flawed Senate version.“Americans demand real
solutions that will protect them from foreign hackers, not knee-jerk
responses that allow companies to fork over huge amounts of their
customers’ private data with only cursory review.”Sen. Ron Wyden said
of the insertion of the CISA into the spending bill.
It’s a shameful
testament to the power of corporations and the intelligence community,
to craft legislation that the American people clearly don’t support and
then hide it within a budget bill to gain passage of the legislation,
due to the fact that the public would never support it otherwise.
What’s
more is that the Praetorian guard, also known as the mainstream media
is choosing to keep it out of the public’s eye.
“There’s plenty wrong with this omnibus, but there’s nothing
more egregious than the cyber language they secretly slipped in,” Rep.
Justin Amash (R-Mich.) told The Hill by email.
Sadly, this seems to be business as usual in Washington, D.C.
When corporations and government craft and push their own
legislation, which by large measure individuals and the public don’t
support, corporate fascism is clearly at the doorstep. A dangerous stage
is being set for turnkey totalitarianism in the United States. Source
December 19, 2015 – KnowTheLies
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