The House intel committee is amending CISPA to address privacy criticisms. Politico’s Tony Romm reports on some of the likely amendments:
Still another amendment specifies clearly that CISPA won’t allow companies to “hack back” their hackers in pursuit of stolen trade secrets …
Really? A government that can’t protect us is debating new measures to make sure we can’t protect ourselves?
Well, it does sound kind of familiar …
UPDATE: To be fair, I’ve now seen the proposed amendment, and it tries to avoid taking a position on active defense, simply saying that CISPA doesn’t give any additional authority to private actors who want to investigate their attackers. That’s still a bad idea, and rather than putting forward a sponsor’s amendment, the committee leadership should tell us exactly who asked them to reduce computer hacking victims to helpless computer hacking victims. This article hints that the idea came from the White House and the Justice Department’s leadership.