People who hang around Congress call ominbus spending bills, like the one Congress is now failing to work out, "Christmas trees." That's because they get a lot of crap hung on them, stuff that hasn't made it through the legislative process, or that would fail in the Senate because of the filibuster, or that wouldn't be able to overcome a presidential veto. Stick it onto a huge must-pass spending bill at the very last minute, and you've got a monster of a "Christmas tree" hung with a whole mess of ornaments. Some of them very ugly and very stinky. Like bringing back the really horrible cybersecurity bill that can't make it through on its own. This one rises to the top because it's a particular project of House Speaker Paul Ryan.
Digital rights advocates are in an uproar as the final text of a major cybersecurity bill appears to lack some of the privacy community's favored clauses.
In the last few weeks, House and Senate negotiators have been working unofficially to reach a compromise between multiple versions of a cyber bill that would encourage businesses to share more data on hacking threats with the government. […]
And it now appears the final language is unlikely to include notable privacy provisions that digital rights and civil liberties groups insist are necessary to reduce the odds the bill enables greater government surveillance. […]
This completed product would mostly sideline the privacy advocate-preferred bill from the House Homeland Security Committee. They believe the Homeland Security bill includes the strongest provisions to protect people’s sensitive data from falling into the NSA's hands.
Ryan is trying to pressure Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) to give in on his version of the bill and support the weakened compromise text to include in the omnibus spending bill. It's not entirely clear why Ryan has decided he has to do this, it surely being something else that will enrage the Freedom Caucus members, a few of whom also tend to be rather protective of privacy rights.
And this is clearly an attack on privacy rights, as the invaluable Marcy Wheeler explains. This bad version of the CISA bill would function essentially like the old warrantless domestic spying authority Congress tried to curtail under the USA Freedom Act. As she says, we already know that Comcast is hacking its own users to see if they're downloading copyrighted material. This CISA bill would have Comcast continuing that hacking AND turning over all the information to the federal government.
Note that this legislation would not require any of the companies involved to actually meet any kind of threshold of requirements to protect themselves and their users from being hacked from the outside. It's not actually cybersecurity. It's domestic spying. And Paul Ryan is all for it.