Liberty Blitzkrieg – by Michael Krieger
So who could possibly be worse than John Boehner? Paul Ryan, of course, which is precisely why he was chosen to lead the RINOs in the stinking cesspool known as the U.S. House of Representatives.
So what is Paul Ryan up to now? Well, he’s trying as hard as possible to pass a grotesque spy bill known as CISA, which stands for the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. Congress has been relentlessly trying to pass similar legislation for years, under constantly changing names.
Now here’s the latest attempt, with Paul Ryan leading the charge. The Guardian reports:
US librarians have joined with a host of civil liberties groups to condemn a cybersecurity bill now passing through Congress they claim will be both “unhelpful” and “dangerous to Americans’ civil liberties”.
The American Library Association, the world’s oldest and largest library affiliation, has joined with 18 other groups including Fight for the Future, Demand Progress and FreedomWorks to issue a letter to the White House and Congress urging lawmakers to oppose the final version of a bill they claim will dramatically expand government surveillance while failing to tackle cyber-attacks.
Republican House speaker Paul Ryan has been leading the charge to push through legislation and reconcile two bills, the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (PCNA) and the National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement with the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (Cisa), a controversial bill that passed a Senate vote in October.
The speed with which Ryan is trying to push through a compromise has worried privacy activists. “We’ve just learned that the Intelligence Committees are trying to pull a fast one,” Nathan White, senior legislative manager at digital rights advocate Access, said in a recent email to supporters. “They’ve been negotiating in secret and came up with a Frankenstein bill – that has some of the worst parts from both the House and the Senate versions.”
According to the letter’s signatories, the proposed “conference” legislation would:
- Create a loophole that would allow the president to remove the Department of Homeland Security, a civilian agency, as the lead government entity managing information sharing.
- Reduce privacy protections for Americans’ personal information.
- Overexpand the term “cyber threat” to facilitate the prosecution of crimes unrelated to cybersecurity.
- Expand already broad liability protection for information disclosure.
- Pre-empt state, local or tribal disclosure laws on any cyber-threat information shared by or with a state, tribal or local government.
- Eliminate a directive to ensure data integrity.
“The final version of this bill is an insult to the public and puts all of us in greater danger of cyber-attacks and government surveillance,” said Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, who organized the letter. “This was already a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation, and now even the meager privacy protections it provided have been gutted, exposing it for what it really is: a bill to dramatically expand abusive government spying.”
Your government at work. As usual, against you.
“We’ve just learned that the Intelligence Committees are trying to pull a fast one,”
Better late than never, I guess.
We figured that sh#t out years ago.
Paul Ryan thinks that by growing a beard and trying to take Boehner’s place that he is all grown up and ready to destroy America like the rest. Hang that little punk kid for high treason!
(I call him a kid because that’s exactly what he looks like every time I see him and growing a beard to make himself look older is not going to change that fact no more than former Texas Governor Perry putting on glasses to make him appear smarter.)