Liberty groups want you to bombard Capitol fax machines to make Internet privacy point

Cybersecurity is currently a hot issue in Congress. Unfortunately, the lawmakers attempting to protect the nation’s computer networks often have little understanding of the technologies they’re writing laws about. That’s why a coalition of online privacy advocates is asking Americans to protest an upcoming cybersecurity vote using technology even the most elderly lawmaker can understand: via fax.

“Congress is stuck in 1984. It doesn’t seem to understand modern technology. So we’re going to communicate with it in a way it’ll understand: With faxes. Thousands and thousands of faxes,” said the coalition — representing the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, The New America Foundation and others — on its website.

The groups hope that bombarding Capitol Hill with faxes will derail the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), which is scheduled for an upcoming vote in the Senate.

The legislation, dubbed the “Darth Vader bill” by the privacy groups, would encourage increased sharing of Internet user data between public and private entities. Proponents of the bipartisan legislation contend that CISA would help government agent’s better recognize and prosecute cybercrimes by increasing their knowledge about hackers.

The online privacy groups, meanwhile, argue that CISA is a “surveillance bill in disguise” that would allow “companies to share nearly any type of information with the government, including significant amounts of personal information.”

“By granting companies sweeping liability protection for sharing private information with the government, the bill would endanger the privacy and civil liberties of internet users and may actually make the internet more vulnerable to attacks,” the groups say.

Privacy advocates have additionally alluded to a dystopian future wherein an individual’s simple Internet search could spark a criminal investigation, warning that the user information handed over could be used by Homeland Security and Justice Department officials for investigations totally unrelated to cybercrimes.

Similar legislation passed in the House earlier in the year.

If you’d like to send an anti-CISA fax to members of the Senate, visit the Stop Cyber Surveillance website.

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