(2.3.2015) Dear Chairman Burr, Vice Chairman Feinstein, and Members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,

We the undersigned civil society organizations, security experts, and academics write to explain how the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA), would significantly undermine privacy and civil liberties. We now know that the National Security Agency (NSA) has secretly collected the personal information of millions of users, and the revelation of these programs has created a strong need to rein in, rather than expand, government surveillance. CISA disregards the fact that information sharing can – and to be truly effective, must – offer both security and robust privacy protections. The legislation fails to achieve these critical objectives by including:

– Automatic NSA access to personal information shared with a governmental entity;
– Inadequate protections prior to sharing;
– Dangerous authorization for countermeasures; and
– Overbroad authorization for law enforcement use.