The FBI has long been searching for a way to bypass the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which they have claimed makes their job difficult, increasingly so in the information age. Previously the FBI just broke the law and hoped it would not get caught. Now the agency wants a patina of legality to cover its transgressions against liberty.

Any time there is an intelligence failure the different intelligence agencies quickly blame each other in hopes of avoiding scrutiny. Let the blame game begin. The Central Intelligence Agency is now claiming they pushed to have Tamerlan Tsarnaev added to a terrorism watch list a year before the Boston Marathon Bombing.

After facing defeat with SOPA – thanks in part to the late Aaron Swartz – the State and Big Business have regrouped and re-branded their bill CISPA. Relying on a lazy press to leave out the details and that a dimwitted public will cower in the face of “cyberterrorism” threats. Somehow cyberterrorism translates into shutting down the internet for Hollywood. They don’t really have an explanation either.

Nonetheless money has bought another bite at the apple as the CISPA bill has now passed the House with 42 Democrats supporting it.

Today the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has overcome another legislative hurdle heading towards passage in the House. The resolution pushing the bill forward passed 227-192 primarily along party lines with 8 Democrats crossing party lines to vote with the Republicans – Barber, Costa, Gutierrez, Schneider, Ruppersberger, McIntyre, Owens, and Matheson.

Hat tip to Boing Boing for passing along this juicy bit of Sunlight Foundation news concerning Mike Rogers (R-MI) and his love of that sweet, sweet CISPA lobby money.

Last year, CISPA passed the House with a few handful of amendments that tried to fix some of its vague language. But the amendments didn’t address many of the significant civil liberties concerns. Those remaining problems were reintroduced in today’s version of CISPA.

A classified intelligence assessment shows the United States is “the target of a massive, sustained cyber-espionage campaign that is threatening the country’s economic competitiveness,” according to the Washington Post.

The tech world got some sweet tax creditsin the Fiscal Cliff bill, which are set to expire at the end of 2013. Setting up tax credits with annual expiration dates that guarantee powerful outside interests will be whipping for their renewal seems to be all the rage when it comes to breaking Congressional gridlock.

Now that the fiscal cliff has been averted, Obama is likely to sign a long-awaited executive order on digital security, which the White House began considering after the cybersecurity bill failed in the Senate this fall.

This week House Republicans will try to pass a part of their budget that would substitute cuts for the poor for planned cuts to the military. That certainly sounds like the first order of government – first, do no harm to defense contractors, and be sure to comfort the afflicted with the knowledge that we have more guns and bombs than the rest of the world, rather than actual, you know, comfort.

A cybersecurity bill that many believe poses clear dangers to digital freedom is drawing the ire of digital freedom and civil liberties groups. The legislation, the Cybersecurity Intelligence Sharing Protection Act (CISPA), should be a major story all week.

In anticipation of headlines that might be made as members of Congress propose amendments to the bill and it continues to take shape before being voted on by the House on April 23, I recorded an interview on CISPA with Trevor Timm, who is a digital freedom activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.