Hacker News Reader

Comment by CWuestefeld | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: the key part is in this bit:

“Consistent with the Constitution of the United States and notwithstanding and other provision of law,” it says (emphasis added), entities may act to preserve the security of their systems. This means that the only law controlling their actions would be the Constitution.

It’s nice that the Constitution would apply</sarcasm>, but the obligations in the Privacy Act of 1974 would not. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act would be void. Even the requirements of the E-Government Act of 2002, such as privacy impact assessments, would be swept aside.

View on HN

Don't forget:

The Constitution doesn’t constrain private actors, of course. This language would immunize them from liability under any and all regulation and under state or common law. Private actors would not be subject to suit for breaching contractual promises of confidentiality. They would not be liable for violating the privacy torts. Anything goes so long as one can make a claim to defending “information systems,” a term that refers to anything having to do with computers.

Elsewhere, the bill creates an equally sweeping immunity against law-breaking so long as the law-breaking provides information to a “cybersecurity exchange.”

Whenever I suspect that politicians might be writing a "power-grab" law, the one sure way I know to confirm it, is to start looking for immunity clauses. They know they are doing something bad that would require the "immunity" or else they wouldn't preemptively put it there.

Whenever I suspect that politicians might be writing a "power-grab" law, the one sure way I know to confirm it

A second way to detect it is to look for the word "bipartisan". If politicians on both sides support it, there's a very good chance that the group being screwed is the public.

> A second way to detect it is to look for the word "bipartisan".

My key is the word "reform". It's almost always used to label something that's going to make things significantly worse.

Bipartisan just means whatever is in the middle of the window of acceptable discourse, which then shrinks further into nothing, until they're no longer debating what policy should be, but merely who should implement it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com