The U.S. Senate has moved forward the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA)—legislation denounced by its many critics as "a surveillance bill in disguise."

With bipartisan support, CISA passed 83-14 in a procedural vote on Thursday.

"The Senate just did a really bad thing," Techdirt's Mike Masnick wrote Thursday, and offered a list of the senators he said "just voted to increase surveillance and decrease trust in our internet companies, thereby harming the American economy and innovation."

As to why the legislation, touted by its supporters as strengthening national cybersecurity, is bad, Freedom of the Press Foundation's Trevor Timm has written that CISA is "really a surveillance bill in disguise." He continues:

The main crux of the bill is to carve a giant exception into all our current privacy laws so as to allow tech companies like Google and Amazon to hand over huge amounts of our information without any legal process whatsoever, as long as they have a vague cybersecurity purpose.