House Passes Cybersecurity Bill After Companies’ Data Breaches
Source: The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Responding to a series of computer security breaches in government and the private sector, the House passed an expansive measure Wednesday that would push companies to share access to their computer networks and records with federal investigators.
The bill, which came after years of false starts and bitter disappointment for the Obama administration, is similar to a measure approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee and headed for that chamber’s floor this spring. The House measure, already largely embraced by the White House, passed, 307 to 116.
Should the House and Senate come together on final legislation, it would be the federal government’s most aggressive response yet to a spate of computer attacks that helped sink a major motion picture release by Sony Pictures Entertainment, exposed the credit card numbers of tens of thousands of customers of Target stores and compromised the personal records of millions of people who did business with the health insurer Anthem.
“The gravity of the emergency we have in cyberspace is setting in with lawmakers,” said Paul Kurtz, who worked on the issue under in the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, and is CEO of TruStar, which aides companies in information sharing. “They now understand that companies can no longer fight the bad guys individually.”
The House bill would provide legal liability protections for companies that share cyberthreat information with each other or with the government. But negotiators also added what they see as critical privacy protections.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/us/politics/computer-attacks-spur-congress-to-act-on-cybersecurity-bill-years-in-making.html
If 2014 was the year of the "Snowden Effect", then 2015 is the year of the "Korean/Chinese/Russian Effect"