When Wyden emerged after the vote from the secret meeting he warned the bill The claim of the CISA bill would ostensibly protect against large-scale data thefts of private consumer information, exemplified by recent hacks of Target, Sony, and Home Depot. The CISA bill, reportedly underwent a many changes during the meeting, and will next go to the full Senate for debate. The passage in on the committee level, however, means it has already succeeded where other recent cybersecurity proposals have failed. The Committee chairman Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) told reporters after the vote that It was noted by Rachel Nusbaum, a ACLU media strategist, that making the information-sharing “voluntary” during criminal proceedings means that the government would, in-fact, be able to obtain private data without a warrant. Rachel Nusbaum said, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the panel, said, The Wall Street Journal writes: Last month a draft (pdf) of the measure was released (and met with resistance from privacy advocates) and because of its vague language could give license to the government to increase unwarranted surveillance of U.S. citizens. Robyn Greene, policy counsel with New America’s Open Technology Institute, said “We are glad that the Senate Intelligence Committee heard the privacy community’s concerns, and we’re eager to see if the changes to the bill will adequately address the significant threats to privacy and internet security that CISA has raised, Based on how dangerously broad and vague the last version of the bill was, it would be surprising if the bill agreed to in secret today will garner the support of the privacy community.” Greene called the earlier draft “as much a backdoor for surveillance as it is a cybersecurity information-sharing bill.” In an interview with Wired, Greene criticized the secretive nature of the meeting, stating, “This bill has the potential to seriously harm Americans’ privacy rights and it wasn’t even debated in public.”
