“I will be fighting to ensure the Senate has a full debate and a chance to offer amendments to add vital protections for American privacy and address the threats to our cybersecurity,” Sen. Ron Wyden said in a statement Tuesday. Wyden, who was the only member of the Senate Intelligence Committee to vote against moving the bill forward to a full vote last March, seemed to leave open the possibility of using filibuster-style tactics to hold up the measure, just like his fellow surveillance opponent, Sen. Rand Paul, used parliamentary procedures to force some surveillance powers under the Patriot Act to expire earlier this month. The Senate voted to reinstate most of them a few days later.
Keith Chu, a Wyden spokesman, told The Daily Beast that the senator hasn’t made a decision about how he will proceed. “But he’s making clear that [McConnell] should allow debate on the bill.”
One key member of the House of Representatives, which has already passed its version of the cyber bill, is worried about a repeat of the late-night, eleventh-hour dramas that accompanied the Senate’s debate over the Patriot Act, and in particular the authority it gave the National Secuirty Agency to collect Americans’ phone records.
“Unfortunately, there’s every indication that that’s likely to happen” with the cyber bill, Rep. Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told The Daily Beast.
Schiff said he didn’t foresee the White House withdrawing its opposition to portions of the defense bill just to ensure that the cyber legislation passes. “I think if it’s an effort to bootstrap onto [the defense bill] to force the president’s hand, it won’t work,” he said. “And it will set back the time it takes to pass cyber information sharing.”
But the stage appeared set for another showdown in the Senate. In a letter to McConnell, the chamber’s four most senior Democrats called his effort to sandwich the cyber and defense bills together “ridiculous.”
“While we must ensure America’s national security, we cannot trifle with Americans’ civil liberties,” they wrote.
The bill before the Senate, called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, would provide a framework for companies and the government to exchange data about cyber attacks on private computer networks, in the hopes of increasing awareness about hackers who are trying to steal to Americans’ financial information, probe critical infrastructures such as the power grid, and infiltrate important computer networks in the government. But critics worry that it will create another route for companies to hand over even more personal details about innocent Americans than they already are.
Continue reading at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/11/gop-chief-is-bailing-out-the-surveillance-state-top-democrats-say.html#
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