From: Foreign Policy
Posted By John Reed
Expect to see Congress produce a cybersecurity bill focused on information sharing make its way to the president in 2013, said senior House and Senate staffers involved in drafting the legislation today.
“I’m pretty confident that if we got to conference we could work a bill out,” said Andrew Grotto, lead staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee today during a conference in Arlington, VA sponsored by C4ISR Journal (yes, that exists, and it’s a publication about spy tech). “There’s very broad agreement on what the parameters of information sharing should look like. We all agree that there needs to be private-to-private sharing, that the sharing has to have reasonable privacy protections built in, and that really what we’re talking about is cybersecurity and not policing IP piracy.”
Still, he warned that the Senate’s Cyber Security Act of 2012, aimed at establishing minimal cybersecurity standards for critical infrastructure providers while making it easier for companies to share cyber threat information, suffered death by filibuster twice last year, despite having majority support in the Senate. This means that the Senate may decide to simply go after less ambitious legislation on information sharing, rather than attempting to push again for minimal cybersecurity standards.
The big question for the Senate is, “do we go comprehensive or not? Do we try to develop a bill that covers critical infrastructure again? I don’t know the answer to that,” said Grotto. “There’s on one hand desire to take what the president did with the [White House’s cybersecurity executive order] and put it in statute. On the other hand, there’s a pragmatic streak in a lot of us that says, ‘maybe that’s a bridge too far and we’re better off focusing on issues of information sharing where there’s a pretty strong consensus on the need to act legislatively.'”
Grotto’s statement seems to back up what Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein told Killer Apps last week: “we are currently drafting a bipartisan information sharing bill and will proceed as soon as we come to an agreement.”
Meanwhile, when asked if we will see cybersecurity legislation presented to the White House this year, Tom Corcoran, senior policy advisor to the House Intelligence Committee, replied with a simple, “yes.”
The House Intelligence Committee produced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, CISPA, that passed the House floor last week. That bill allows private businesses to quickly share information on cyber threats with each other and the government.
However, the White House has threatened to veto CISPA as it currently stands, saying that it wants information shared with the government to have to go through a civilian agency such as the Department of Homeland Security before going to other government organizations, instead of being passed directly to the military. The White House also wants to narrow the scope of immunities from lawsuits for violating antitrust or privacy laws or that would be granted to companies sharing information with each other or the government.
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