user: Input: The Senate, ignorant on cybersecurity, just passed a bill about it anyway
Under the vague guise of “cybersecurity”, the Senate voted Tuesday to pass the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa), a spying bill that essentially carves a giant hole in all our privacy laws and allows tech and telecom companies to hand over all sorts of private information to intelligence agencies without any court process whatsoever. Make no mistake: Congress has passed a surveillance bill in disguise, with no evidence it’ll help our security.

Related: Senate passes controversial cybersecurity bill Cisa 74 to 21

All that is needed for companies to hand over huge swaths of information to the government is for it to contain “cyber threat indicators” – a vague phrase that can be interpreted to mean pretty much anything. Your personal information – which can include the content of emails – will be handed over to the Department of Homeland Security, the agency supposedly responsible for the nation’s cybersecurity. From there the information can be sent along to the NSA, which can add it to databases or use it to conduct even more warrantless searches on its internet backbone spying (which once again, a judge ruled last week could not be challenged in court because no one can prove the NSA is spying on them, since the agency inevitably keeps that information secret).

Try asking the bill’s sponsors how the bill will prevent cyberattacks or force companies and governments to improve their defenses. They can’t answer. They will use buzzwords like “info-sharing” yet will conveniently ignore the fact that companies and the government can already share information with each other as is.

There were barely any actual cybersecurity experts who were for the bill. A large group of respected computer scientists and engineers were against it. So were cyberlaw professors. Civil liberties groups uniformly opposed (and were appalled by) the bill. So did consumer groups. So did the vast majority of giant tech companies. Yet it still sailed through the Senate, mostly because lawmakers - many of whom can barely operate their own email - know hardly anything about the technology that they’re crafting legislation about.

This is the state of “cybersecurity” legislation in this country, where lawmakers wanted to do something, but lacking any sort of technical expertise – or any clue at all what to do – just decided to cede more power to intelligence agencies like the NSA. The bill, which used to be known as Cispa, has been festering in Congress for years, and now it looks like it will finally head to the President’s desk.

Along the way, the Senate decided to reject a handful of common sense privacy amendments that could’ve protected that information. One by one, privacy and transparency amendments that would’ve at least made the bill less awful were voted down on Tuesday.

First, they voted down Senator Ron Wyden’s amendment that would’ve forced companies to strip out personally identifiable information before handing data over to the government. They voted down Senator Patrick Leahy’s amendment that would’ve prevented Cisa from carving out a new exemption to the Freedom of Information Act, which will prevent news organizations and others from using the transparency law to find out what types of information companies are handing over to the government.

In an era of secret law, where the government has no problem completely re-interpreting laws in complete secrecy to allow mass spying on Americans, we now have another law on the books that carves a hole in our privacy laws, contains vague language that can be interpreted any which way, and that has provisions inserted into it specifically to prevent us from finding out how they’re using it.
What was this article about?
++++++++++
It's about: This is the state of such legislation in this country, where lawmakers wanted to do something but, by passing Cisa, just decided to cede more power to the NSA


Q: Topo takes big steps in the running shoe world

Tony Post hopes to use money from a recent investment round to help his Newton company, Topo Athletic, expand overseas.

Taking on the big boys in the running shoe industry isn’t easy. That’s why Tony Post knows he’s lucky he landed more funding from Norwest Venture Partners, to give his company, Topo Athletic, the resources it needs for an international expansion. It was worth it, he says, even though that meant losing a controlling stake in his Newton firm.

California-based Norwest now has the majority share, after leading a $2.5 million round of funding for Topo; Post says he kicked in about 10 percent of that amount. Topo’s running shoes are now in about 300 stores, Post says, nearly twice the number from a year ago.

But that number is still tiny compared to titans like Nike and Adidas. So Post says he’s embarking on an international push. Most of his business takes place in the US, with an increasing number of sales in Canada and small amounts in Spain and the United Kingdom. Next up: Hong Kong, Thailand, Denmark and Norway.

Topo will have some help in this expansion from two new board members, Second Time Around CEO Kristin Kohler Burrows and Jef Holove, the general manager of Intel’s Basis wearable device business.

Even with the extra money, Topo doesn’t plan to spend a ton of money on traditional advertising. It’s more cost effective, Post says, to spread the word in social media and through the company’s 33 “ambassadors” who talk up the brand in their own communities. They get paid in shoes for their efforts. For some fitness fanatics, that’s enough.

A:

assistant: Newton-based Topo Athletic gears up for a national expansion.