What’s Inside the Justice Department’s Secret Cybersecurity Memo?

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) has many problems with the cybersecurity bill that the Senate may take up before the August recess. But he can only talk about some of them publicly. Other reservations remain strictly classified. Sen Wyden, the Democratic privacy hawk from Oregon, claims that a classified Justice Department legal opinion written during the early years of the George W. Bush Administration is pertinent to the upper chamber's consideration of cyberlegislation -- a warning that reminds close observers of his allusions to the National Security Agency's surveillance powers years before they were exposed publicly by Edward Snowden.

The Obama Administration pledges that it does not rely upon the memo, which some privacy experts have speculated could be used under the auspices of cybersecurity to allow government surveillance of Americans' Internet usage. Sen Wyden and civil-liberties advocates worry that the memo could be invoked by a future president, a concern fueled in part by the use of other Bush-era legal opinions written to justify warrantless surveillance and the CIA's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" during the war on terror. Sen Wyden has railed against the information-sharing legislation passed out of the Senate Intelligence Committee as a "surveillance bill by another name." While its boosters say it could help minimize the damage wrought by hacks like those that crippled Sony Pictures or laid bare the Office of Personnel Management's records of federal employees, Sen Wyden insists that the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, is overly broad and that evidence is thin that it would improve cybersecurity.