I AM Edward Snowden, Ask Me Anything.

As somebody who has actually worked for the NSA tracking Chinese cyber activity, I can say from personal experience that you are absolutely right.
CISA isn't a cybersecurity bill. It's not going to stop any attacks. It's not going to make us any safer. It's a surveillance bill. What it allows is for the companies you interact with every day -- visibly, like Facebook, or invisibly, like AT&T -- to indiscriminately share private records about your interactions and activities with the government.
In theory, this is supposed to allow the government to sort through what is in effect the entire private network space of civil society within the United States for "indicators of compromise," or, more simply, red flags that indicate a hack has happened. The problem is that the NSA, FBI, and other organizations already do this on a higher level of the network under other authorities, such as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. They don't like that, though, because it means there are still parts of the internet and types of records that they aren't (legally) allowed to add to the dragnet.
CISA changes that. CISA allows private companies to immediately share a perfect record of your private activities the instant you click a link, log in, make a purchase, and so on -- and the government with reward for doing it by granting them a special form of legal immunity for their cooperation. This is a bill that will radically reshape the relationship between users and companies, because it undermines the core foundation of trust on the internet: that companies work for users rather than governments.
At the end of the day, this is an up/down vote on the future of the internet. Call your senator and make sure they're speaking for you, rather than against you.

/r/technology Thread Parent