Businesses and trade groups The CISA has received some support from advocacy groups, including the
United States Chamber of Commerce, the
National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and the
Financial Services Roundtable. as well as individual companies such as
Twitter,
Yelp,
Apple, and
Reddit.
BSA (The Software Alliance) appeared initially supportive of CISA, sending a letter on July 21, 2015, urging the senate to bring the bill up for debate. On September 14, 2015, the BSA published a letter of support for amongst other things cyber threat information sharing legislation addressed to Congress, signed by board members
Adobe,
Apple Inc.,
Altium,
Autodesk,
CA Technologies,
DataStax,
IBM,
Microsoft,
Minitab,
Oracle,
Salesforce.com,
Siemens, and
Symantec. This prompted the digital rights advocacy group
Fight for the Future to organize a protest against CISA. Following this opposition campaign, BSA stated that its letter expressed support for cyber threat sharing legislation in general, but did not endorse CISA, or any pending cyber threat sharing bill in particular. BSA later stated that it is opposed to CISA in its current form. The
Computer & Communications Industry Association, another major trade group including members such as
Google,
Amazon.com,
Cloudflare,
Netflix,
Facebook,
Red Hat, and
Yahoo!, also announced its opposition to the bill.
Government officials Proponents of CISA include the bill's main cosponsors, senators
Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and
Richard Burr (R-NC). Some senators have announced opposition to CISA, including
Ron Wyden (D-OR),
Rand Paul (R-KY), and
Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has objected to the bill based on a classified legal opinion from the
Justice Department written during the early
George W Bush administration. The
Obama administration states that it does not rely on the legal justification laid out in the memo. Wyden has made repeated requests to the
US Attorney General to declassify the memo, dating at least as far back as when a 2010
Office of Inspector General report cited the memo as a legal justification for the FBI's warrantless wire-tapping program. On August 4, 2015, White House spokesman
Eric Schultz endorsed the legislation, calling for the senate to "take up this bill as soon as possible and pass it". The
United States Department of Homeland Security initially supported the bill, with
Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the DHS, calling for the bill to move forward on September 15. However, in an August 3 letter to senator
Al Franken (D-MN), the deputy secretary of the DHS,
Alejandro Mayorkas, expressed a desire to have all connections be brokered by the DHS, given the department's charter to protect the executive branch networks. In the letter, the DHS found issue with the direct sharing of information with all government agencies, advocating instead that the DHS be the sole recipient of cyberthreat information, allowing it to scrub out private information. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security has published a Privacy Impact Assessment detailing its internal review of the proposed system for handling incoming indicators from Industry.
Civil liberties groups Privacy advocates opposed a version of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, passed by the Senate in October 2015, that left intact portions of the law they said made it more amenable to surveillance than actual security while quietly stripping out several of its remaining privacy protections. CISA has been criticized by advocates of
Internet privacy and
civil liberties, such as the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and the
American Civil Liberties Union.
Similar laws in different countries United Kingdom government policy: cyber security The Scottish Government Information Sharing ==See also==