Pentagon Might Share US Data with Foreign Militaries

As Ashton Carter unveiled the Pentagon’s new Cyber Strategy recently he underscored its importance by revealing that DOD networks had been infiltrated by actors within Russia. The defense secretary did not emphasize a provision of the strategy that could send private data about US citizens and companies to foreign militaries.
The new strategy indirectly, but unequivocally, ties into information-sharing legislation that’s slowly making its way to the President’s desk. Among the various bills moving around Capitol Hill, the most important is the Cyber Information Sharing Act. Among other things, CISA would protect companies from being sued for sending data about their users to DHS, which would be permitted to send it in real time to DOD and other US agencies and outfits. In turn, DOD’s new strategy claims the right to share cyber threat data beyond the United States. Presumably, that would include information obtained via CISA.
In particular, the new strategy pledges DOD cyber assistance, including information sharing, to allies in the Middle East. “As a part of its cyber dialogue and partnerships, DOD will work with key Middle Eastern allies and partners to improve their ability to secure their military networks as well as the critical infrastructure and key resources upon which U.S. interests depend. Key initiatives include improved information sharing to establish a unified understanding of the cyber threat, an assessment of our mutual cyber defense posture, and collaborative approaches to building cyber expertise.”
Robyn Greene, who serves as policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, argued that the bills would allow companies to collect and share a lot more information about the people that they interact with online. Moreover, there would be few limits on how the U.S. government could use that information. It could, for example, be used to investigate or prosecute crimes that have nothing to do with stopping hacks.
This authorization, it has been argued, would not just seriously undermine Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, which would otherwise require the government to obtain a warrant based on probable cause to access much of that same information, it would create an expansive new means of general-purpose government surveillance. 
Others say that better sharing of certain kinds of information would help predict cyber threats without particularly imperiling privacy or constitutional rights.
Defense One: http://bit.ly/1Rk6qUk