Cybersecurity Bill Amendment Would Allow U.S. Courts To Track And Convict Foreign Nationals For Crimes Committed Abroad
An amendment for the recently passed Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) bill would permit the US courts to chase and jail foreign nationals for crimes committed overseas.
According to a report by The Guardian on Oct.22, the objective of the amendment of the controversial bill is to lower the difficulty for indicting crimes committed outside the United States.
The amendment of the cybersecurity bill was initiated by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Reports have revealed that the amendment of CISA bill passed in the Senate on Thursday.
Sputnik News reported on the same day that the amendment would make stealing of data from any American company a crime punished by imprisonment in the US even if the crime was committed abroad.
The US Senate passed the cybersecurity bill on Tuesday after a 74-to-21 vote. Meanwhile, a co-author of the bill says they tried to make the bill clear and understandable.
"For me this has been a six year effort ... and it hasn't been easy because what we tried to do was strike a balance and make the bill understandable so that there would be a cooperative effort to share between companies and with the government," says Senator Dianne Feinstein, as noted by The Washington Post on Tuesday.
Last week, the White House expressed its support to the recently passed CISA bill in a dispatch. It says that the Obama administration supports the bill's requirement "that an entity sharing information with the Federal Government must share that information through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to receive liability protections."
However, privacy activists are concern that such requisite would turn the bill into a backdoor surveillance legislation that would be an advantage to the intelligence community.
On the other hand, the Senate rejected a couple of amendments for the cybersecurity bill on the same day, including the amendments proposed by Senator Ron Wyden and Senator Dean Heller.
Further reports have revealed that some tech companies oppose the recently passed CISA bill.
"We don't support the current CISA proposal," the tech giant said in a dispatch. "The trust of our customers means everything to us and we don't believe security should come at the expense of their privacy."