CISA finally receives Senate approval but fails to excite the media
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act was finally approved by the Senate last night with more than three-quarters of senators giving their seal of approval. Although leading technology firms, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, fought hard against the Bill, news of its approval failed to make the front pages of any major US broadsheet. As the New York Times points out, the Bill has taken so long to pass, that many of the proposed measures are now dated as the sophistication of hackers accelerates. 

WASHINGTON — After four years of false starts and strife over privacy protections, the Senate passed legislation by a vote of 74 to 21 on Tuesday that would help companies battle a daily onslaught of cyberattacks.

But there is one problem with the legislation, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA: In the years that Congress was debating it, computer attackers have grown so much more sophisticated — in many cases, backed by state sponsors from Shanghai to Tehran — that the central feature of the legislation, agreements allowing companies and the government to share information, seems almost quaint. To many in the trenches of daily computer combat, it is a little like the insistence of some cavalry officers in the 1930s on sticking to horses, rather than investing in mechanized divisions.

The sponsors of the legislation concede that it would have done nothing to help Sony Pictures Entertainment, whose computers were melted down 11 months ago in a remarkably destructive attack for which the White House blamed North Korea.

That attack was not based on the kinds of previously seen computer viruses or tools that companies and the government could warn each other about. It would not have stopped the Chinese from cleaning out security records on 22 million Americans from the Office of Personnel Management, which failed to put in place the same basic computer-hygiene practices that the federal government urges companies and individuals to practice. It would not have helped the State Department and the White House, whose unclassified emails were hacked by the Russians.