The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) of 2015 expires in less than 48 hours. A replacement is inevitable; the government can’t simply relinquish a power it once held. It will be framed as necessary, but the reality may prove quite the opposite.

CISA’s language was dressed up in the rhetoric of national security, but in practice it was an information-sharing system that blurred lines between private platforms and federal agencies. It was controversial, for good reason, but it was still bound to the machinery of government. There were names, faces, and offices that could be subpoenaed. 

But CISA is expiring, and the draft of its replacement—H.R. 5079—shows us where the baton is being passed. Instead of agencies tasked with oversight and decision-making, the text anticipates AI-driven “threat classification engines” as the functional arbiters of what constitutes a risk, a violation, or even a crime.

The bill goes further. In Section 108, it explicitly clarifies that nothing in the law should block the use of artificial intelligence strictly deployed for cybersecurity purposes. In plain terms, agencies now have the discretion to use AI as they see fit, and the law ensures that such use cannot be legally precluded. What was once subject to human judgment, oversight, and debate can now be filtered through algorithms that evolve on their own, all while remaining fully lawful. This codification turns AI from a tool into a quasi-authority: it can act, adjudicate, and classify, and the law gives it a protected seat at the table, all without the same lines of accountability that once existed for human decision-makers. This is worth noting: many content creators banned from 2019–2021 were legally removed under this law. Now, we may face the next round with AI-driven enforcement.

That shift matters. It means authority no longer lives in an office or under a director’s signature. It lives in code: dynamic, opaque, and designed to evolve on its own. What once could be debated in congressional hearings now dissolves into machine reasoning, cloaked in the language of efficiency and national security. And that is where the plausible deniability begins.

When an agency misclassifies information, it can be scrutinized, corrected, even dismantled like we’ve seen countless times. When an AI does it, the blame evaporates. Was it a bug? A training data error? A gap in oversight? Or simply the “best assessment” of a probabilistic engine? The answer will always be flexible, and that flexibility is precisely what makes it dangerous. Code becomes the shield, not just for the state but for the actors behind it, because the code can always be said to have “misinterpreted.”

This is not a matter of efficiency; it’s a matter of sovereignty. Agencies exist to receive direction from Congress; they are meant to be the executors of democratically expressed will, however diluted that may be in practice. Replacing them with adaptive systems means allowing the rationale of the machine to fill in legal gaps on its own terms. Those gaps will grow over time, as the law ages, as threats evolve, as interpretations stretch. 

The expiration of CISA should be a moment for reflection: do we want more accountability, more clarity in how information is shared and acted upon? Or are we quietly accepting that accountability is a relic, and that narrative control can be handed off to code because it is less visible, less contestable, and ultimately harder to discuss in the public square?

The choice isn’t just between one law and its successor, it’s between governance we can confront and governance we can’t even see. Between accountability we can demand and code that answers to no one.

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Want to understand how this erosion of accountability fits into the bigger picture of civic life? Dive deeper into the patterns shaping our society in Civic Ineptitude: Signals in a Nation of Noise here. It’s a critical read if you want to see the forces behind public inaction, systemic noise, and how power quietly moves in the shadows.

© 2025 Zakariyas James. First shared here at theruminationcompilation.wordpress.com.