White House Once Again Threatens to Veto CISPA

As it did when the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, first passed the House Intelligence Committee last year, the White House on Tuesday said President Barack Obama's senior advisors would recommend he issue a veto threat on privacy grounds if the bill reached his desk in its current form

The House of Representatives, which first passed CISPA last year on a vote of 248-168 despite the veto threat before stalling in the Senate, is set to vote on the bill once again by the end of this week.

The Obama administration is particularly concerned CISPA would not require companies to take "reasonable steps" to strip cybersecurity data of personally identifiable information before sharing it with government agencies and would grant companies a "broad scope of liability limitations" in the case of privacy breaches. CISPA has been heavily criticized by privacy rights groups for failing to require such stripping and for granting legal protection to companies which potentially disclose private information about their customers. Read more...