Federal Authority over the Internet? The Cybersecurity Act of 2009
Does over regulation concern you? Government to regulate incandescent light bulbs. What’s next? Will they tell you what you can do on the internet?
In other words, the bill would give the Commerce Department absolute, non-emergency access to “all relevant data” without any privacy safeguards like standards or judicial review. The broad scope of this provision could eviscerate statutory protections for private information, such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Privacy Protection Act, or financial privacy regulations. Even worse, it isn’t clear whether this provision would require systems to be designed to enable access, essentially a back door for the Secretary of Commerce that would also establish a primrose path for any bad guy to merrily skip down as well. If the drafters meant to create a clearinghouse for system vulnerability information along the lines of a US/CERT mailing list, that could be useful, but that’s not what the bill’s current language does.
Federal Authority Over the Internet? The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 | Electronic Frontier Foundation
