A new law which was passed by congress had a last minute amendment which will mean that employers have the right to demand your private passwords.

CISPA means all sorts of evil things for US citizens, but one of the strangest is that your boss apparently owns you. A last minute alteration to the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) that would have prevented employers demanding that prospective employees disclose social media passwords as a condition of employment was voted down in the house of representatives.

However for some reason Congress, after consultation with their big corporate sponsors, decided that it would not be a good idea and defeated it by a 224-189 majority. This means that if you are in the land of the free your employer has the right to demand you hand over any passwords to connect to social media sites so that they can spy on you and decide if they can fire you on the basis of what you post.

The password privacy measure was initialy proposed as part of the Federal Communications Commission Process Reform Act of 2012 and warned that social media users have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But bill sponsor Mike Rogers claimed that Democrat Ed Perlmutter  who proposed the change to CISPA was trying to kill the act and it should be addressed in separate legislation.

At the moment the bill may be spiked by President Obama who feels that the law gives too much power to corporates and lets too many of them off the hook if they misbehave.