Senate Kills Controversial Cybersecurity Bill

As usual, it would have given the government lots and lots of power

With your help last summer we helped defeat Senator Lieberman's Cybersecurity Act. But for some reason, Senate Majority Leader Reid decided to call for another vote on the bill in the lame duck session today. After an hour's debate, the full Senate voted 51 to 47 against cloture for the Cybersecurity Act, meaning it can't move forward for a vote.

We've spent months going over the various faults in the bill—and of the faults in the other proposed Cybersecurity bills. We were particularly concerned because the Cybersecurity Act included overly vague definitions for key terms like "cybersecurity threat," "cybersecurity threat indicator," and even "countermeasures."

EFF believes in strong privacy and security for networked devices—that's why we champion technologies like Tor and HTTPS Everywhere. But we believe that legislation in the arena of cybersecurity should not provide broad, vague powers that allow companies to skirt existing privacy law.