A few tweets from Salesforce's Marc Benioff threaten to squash a cyber-spying law

Internet privacy advocates have been on the warpath against a bill called Cyber Threat Information Sharing Legislation (CISA, bill S.754). They say it would allow government agencies to spy on citizens more easily.

So when the software industry's lobby group, the Business Software Alliance, wrote an open letter to Congress asking it to pass a bunch of cyber bills, one privacy watchdog group got angry.

One of the bills the BSA supports is the similarly named "Cyber Threat Sharing Act of 2015 (S.456)."

The BSA's letter was signed by the lawyers of some of its biggest members including Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, Symantec.

Privacy group Fight for the Future read the letter and fired up an internet campaign called "YouBetrayedUs.org" that sent 23,000 emails to the software companies involved, it said. It was also trying to get developers to boycott Salesforce's cloud, Heroku.

This group believed that CTSA was another bill just like CISA that would "give corporations total legal immunity when they share private user data with the government and with each other," it warned.

The uproar provoked a response from Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff, who took to Twitter to disavow CISA.

Benioff tweeted, "The letter clearly was a mistake and doesn't imply CISA support. We need to clarify. I'm against it."

He also tweeted," Contrary to reports Salesforce doesn't support the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA).

 

Benioff's tweets dissing CISA spread and soon, the BSA itself issued a statement saying it doesn't like CISA, either, nor two similar bills.

For clarity, BSA does not support any of the three current bills pending before Congress, including the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (PCNA), and the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) Act," the new letter said.

BSA also insisted that CTSA, the bill that it does support, was an entirely different beast, involving "voluntary information sharing." 

With the largest software lobbying group and powerful industry CEO Marc Benioff now publicly opposing CISA, it will much harder, and likely impossible, for Congress to pass CISA. 

As for CTSA? We'll see.

But if it CTSA proves to be problematic, Benioff has no problem lobbying against laws he thinks are unjust. Last spring, his public activism helped roll back some controversial anti-gay legislation in Indiana and other states.

He and his co-founder Parker Harris are also very publicly trying to solve the problem of lack of opportunity and unequal pay for women in the tech industry, starting at Salesforce.