Rainey Reitman, activism director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is an outspoken contributor to the CISPA debate. Reitman said that while CISPA proponents employ rhetoric that the bill will “fend off a cyber Pearl Harbor,” what they’re really doing is inciting fears of security threats when, in fact, such concerns have existed for years. “I do think there is a need for companies to get more information from the government in a timely fashion. The problem that arises with CISPA is that it does so much more than that,” she says.

Like what?

“It also opens the floodgates for companies to intercept communications of everyday Internet users and pass unredacted personal information to the governments,” she says, adding that several amendments to the bill would have addressed such concerns but they never made it to the House floor for a vote.

Reitman says civil liberties groups like the EFF don’t want cyber security programs to be a method by which intelligence agencies or the military can garner information about American citizens.

As for why many companies such as Facebook support CISPA, Reitman says the companies understandably want to be better informed about security vulnerabilities and promise not to spy on users or hand unredacted information over to the government. On the other hand, she says CISPA as it stands now lets companies bypass all existing privacy law and pass citizens’ personal data to the government even if there’s a weak excuse that the information is related to cyber security purposes.