OMNIBUS BILLS PRODUCE CHICANERY. BAN THEM. Ominous Cybersharing Legislation Finds a Seat on the Omnibus: CISA is alive and appears to have the White House’s support.

Lodged toward the bottom of the 2000-plus page, $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill is the Cybersecurity Act of 2015 (it starts on page 1,728 here if you’re feeling like a masochist). This is what has come of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), the controversial (in tech quarters where people are paying attention anyway) legislation that encourages private businesses to share customer data with the federal government in exchange for liability from lawsuits in the case of data breaches, all under the guise of fighting cybercrime.

The controversy is that this alleged cybersecurity legislation actually appears to be a new form of authorization for surveillance. Experts say it won’t actually improve cybersecurity at all (partly because the federal government has a poor reputation for handling such data), and major tech companies like Apple, Google, and Twitter oppose it.

But here it is, being shoved into a “must pass” bill, escorted in by new Majority Leader Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.). Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future, an activist group fighting the passage of CISA-style privacy-threatening Internet regulations, has a dim view of the legislation.

“There’s been a bunch of negative changes to the bill over the last couple of weeks,” Greer says. “It went from something that was supposed to be a cybersecurity bill and has become a surveillance bill. It has even become a mass incarceration bill. … They’ll be able to investigate, prosecute and jail people for a wide variety of offenses that having nothing to do with cybersecurity and terrorism.”

Message to the GOP: You have the Trump threat because you pulled crap like this after 2010 and again after 2014.