CISPA Is Dead, Long Live CISPA

Adam Clark Estes | Atlantic Wire | April 25, 2013

After stirring up trouble for months, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) died a quiet death in the Senate on Thursday. Despite the bill's passage in the House, Senators decided to pigeonhole the legislation. It was not necessarily a surprising move for the Upper House, especially given the fact that the Obama administration made a veto threat. However, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation is not completely forgetting about CISPA. "We're not taking [CISPA] up," a committee representative told the press on Thursday. "Staff and senators are divvying up the issues and the key provisions everyone agrees would need to be handled if we're going to strengthen cybersecurity. They'll be drafting separate bills."

So we get a new potentially privacy-crushing and probably problematic cybersecurity bill! Well, we shouldn't really describe the new bill like that since we don't know what will be in the new bill. CISPA was the potentially privacy-crushing and certainly problematic cybersecurity bill that stirred up the type of widespread outrage. [...]