A week of campaign against the Senate vote on the Cybersecurity Act of 2012

This week, as the Cybersecurity Act (CSA) moves to the Senate floor, Reporters Without Borders is joining a wide-ranging coalition of digital rights groups and advocates to launch the second Stop Cyber Spying campaign. The campaign will encourage individuals to contact their Senators in support of amendments to CSA that would better safeguard privacy. The Stop Cyber Spying coalition supports an amendment from Senators Al Franken and Rand Paul that would ensure companies do not have new, overboard authority to monitor and block private communications. The coalition also opposes attempts to remove privacy protections in the bill, including any amendments that would hand the reins of America's cybersecurity systems to a secretive military intelligence agency like the NSA, which is not accountable to the public for what it does with our private data. Last April, a similar coalition joined forces for the original Stop Cyber Spying campaign, a week of action in opposition to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, otherwise known as CISPA. Ultimately, CISPA passed the House of Representatives, but not before major outcry that helped lead to substantial privacy improvements, a veto threat from the White House, and a significant number of "no" votes on a bill that previously looked poised to sail through with little opposition. The Stop Cyber Spying campaign now hopes to beat back floor amendments to the CSA that could make the bill look more like CISPA. The Twitter hashtag for the campaign is #DefendPrivacy.