Can the government legally invade your privacy?

Absolutely, it can.  Some people think that's a good thing and others don't. 

The problem isn't so much 'the government' as a whole.  Rather, it's rogue agencies and malicious individuals inside the government that are a genuine threat to your privacy and freedom.  That's why (within the limits of the law) you need to protect your personal and business information from prying eyes.

The U.S. Senate has just passed the controversial cybersecurity bill, 'Cisa' - the overall purpose of which is to make it legal for various branches of the government to share mined data between themselves and for large companies (like Sony, for example) to share and receive data from these same agencies.  The data in question would come from private industry, which mines everything from credit card statements to prescription drug-purchase records in order to target advertising and tweak product lines. Indeed, much of it is detailed financial and health information the government has never had access to in any form.

The idea (we're told) is to better protect the government and large corporations from major cyber attacks.  However, some say that the government just granted itself the power to collect sensitive personal data unchecked.  Numerous civil liberties groups and many of the biggest names in the tech sector agree with that assessment.

By the way, Cisa was negotiated and marked up in secret.

Ahead of the Senate vote, a group of university professors specializing in tech law, many from the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, sent an open letter to the lawmakers, urging them not to pass the bill. The bill, they wrote, would fatally undermine the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).  Led by Princeton’s David S. Levine, the group joined a chorus of critics including many of the largest technology companies, such as Apple. 

Not surprisingly, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden is calling for Cisa to be scrapped.  However,  the American Banking Association and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) applauded the passage of the bill. “The legislation passed by the Senate today bolsters our cyber defenses by providing the liability protections needed to encourage the voluntary sharing of cyber threat information,” the TIA said in a statement. “We applaud the Senate for moving this important bill and urge Congressional leaders to act quickly to send this bill to the president’s desk.”

When it comes to cybercrooks, is all of this a good thing or a bad thing?  It all depends on how much you trust the government... and the giant corporations it partners with.