As it did when the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, first passed the House Intelligence Committee last year, the White House on Tuesday said President Barack Obama's senior advisors would recommend he issue a veto threat on privacy grounds if the bill reached his desk in its current form.

The House of Representatives, which first passed CISPA last year on a vote of 248-168 despite the veto threat before stalling in the Senate, is set to vote on the bill once again by the end of this week.

The Obama administration is particularly concerned CISPA would not require companies to take "reasonable steps" to strip cybersecurity data of personally identifiable information before sharing it with government agencies and would grant companies a "broad scope of liability limitations" in the case of privacy breaches. CISPA has been heavily criticized by privacy rights groups for failing to require such stripping and for granting legal protection to companies which potentially disclose private information about their customers.

"Citizens have a right to know that corporations will be held accountable –- and not granted immunity –- for failing to safeguard personal information adequately," reads a White House statement of administration policy issued Tuesday and embedded below.

The White House also said that private businesses should not dictate which agencies receive their threat information and cybersecurity information collected under CISPA should enter the federal government through the civilian Department of Homeland Security. As written, CISPA would allow governments to share cybersecurity threat information with federal agencies of their choosing, including the National Security Agency — an arrangement that quickly became one of privacy groups' central criticisms of the bill.

"The Administration supports the longstanding tradition to treat the Internet and cyberspace as civilian spheres, while recognizing that the Nation's cybersecurity requires shared responsibility from individual users, private sector network owners and operators, and the appropriate collaboration of civilian, law enforcement, and national security entities in government," reads the statement.

The White House did, however, welcome the House Intelligence Committee's vote to remove language allowing information collected under CISPA to be used for vaguely-defined "national security purposes," a move it says "significantly weakened the restrictions on how this information could be used by the government."

CISPA is intended to allow private companies and government agencies to share information about cybersecurity threats with one another in order to bolster their mutual defense against cybersecurity threats. While supporters, including many businesses, say such information sharing is necessary to ward off hackers in real time, CISPA's opponents argue the information sharing would compromise Americans' privacy.

The Obama administration, as it did last year, maintains that a middle-of-the-road solution which appeals to both sides of the debate is possible. Accordingly, it outlined in its statement three criteria which an information-sharing cybersecurity bill must meet to avoid a veto threat: it must "carefully safeguard privacy and civil liberties," preserve the "roles and missions" of civilian and intelligence agencies and call for "appropriate" sharing with "targeted liability protection."

The White House also took the opportunity to call for broader legislation which would set cybersecurity standards for critical infrastructure (which the Senate has been debating), update laws guiding Federal agency network security, update the tools law enforcement can use "to fight crime in the digital age" and create a National Data Breach Reporting requirement.

Is CISPA the best way to bolster American interests' defense against cybersecurity threats? Share your thoughts in the comments