Statement by Robert C. Weber, IBM Senior Vice President and General Counsel
ARMONK, N.Y. - Saturday, December 14th 2013 [ME NewsWire]
(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Yesterday, IBM (NYSE:IBM) learned of a lawsuit pushing a wild conspiracy theory. This lawsuit seeks to confuse IBM's support for a U.S. cybersecurity legislative proposal -- which has yet to be enacted -- with the completely unrelated NSA surveillance program called PRISM. Even a cursory reading of the legislative proposal, known as CISPA, makes clear that it has nothing to do with the recently disclosed NSA surveillance program. The legislation is designed to help protect companies from cyber attacks by encouraging the sharing of technical cyber threat information, such as malware code. The ability for those under attack to work together to help prevent cybercrime is a modern business requirement and an important goal, which is why many companies, including IBM, support such legislation. This bill does not refer to China, and it does not authorize government surveillance, facts that the plaintiff and its attorneys could have easily determined had they bothered to do the slightest fact checking.
Starting from this fictitious connection between CISPA and PRISM, the complaint proceeds to make numerous specious and false accusations, and IBM calls upon the law firm that filed this action to do the right thing and dismiss this action immediately. To fail to do so is a profound disservice to the judicial system, to the public, and in this case, to IBM.
IBM will vigorously fight this baseless lawsuit.
Contacts
IBM
Doug Shelton, 914-499-6533
doshelton@us.ibm.com