Senior Former Intelligence Official Admits That 'The Point' of CISA Is Surveillance

by Mike Masnick
Techdirt
Oct. 28, 2015

Senator Ron Wyden -- who has been fighting back against secret laws expanding surveillance for years -- made it clear months ago that CISA was really "a surveillance bill by another name." Of course, if you just read the bill it might not appear that way, because you need to understand how it works with a variety of secret orders and surveillance authorities -- along with secret interpretations of the law. We've tried to piece together how CISA is filling in a big missing blank in what the intelligence community needs to conduct broad warrantless domestic surveillance on internet users (something that it has been restricted from doing in the past few years).

Marcy Wheeler has uncovered another little tidbit -- buried in a CNN article all about CISA, in which the reporter speaks to a former senior US intelligence official:

"Would it give our spy agencies greater visibility? Definitely. That's the point," the official said.

Except, of course, the backers of the bill, Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have been basically shoving each other aside to insist that's not the point at all. They keep insisting that the bill has nothing to do with surveillance or the intelligence community and is just about domestic cybersecurity efforts, and that everyone's supposedly barred from doing more with it (until you look at the fine print, of course). Of course, it's possible that this is just a misstatement by the nameless former official, but it might also be a pretty clear admission of what most folks have been saying from the beginning. CISA is a surveillance bill, disguised to look like it's about "cybersecurity."