House Will Consider Disturbing Cybersecurity Bill

Last edited Wed Apr 11, 2012, 05:31 PM - Edit history (1)

Source: The Nation

Most people involved in the cyber-terrorism debate agree that better information sharing between the private sector and government is needed—the current law structure doesn’t allow for good enough cooperation between government security agencies and private companies who come under massive cyber-attacks.

One bill in the House, by Representative Dan Lungren, does a decent job of addressing these concerns. It’s being debated this month in the normal procedure of open committee sessions. But another bill, by Representatives Mike Rogers and C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, containing potentially grave civil liberties violations, was approved in one secret session—and is the bill being promoted by Republican House leadership and industry groups.

The Rogers-Ruppersberger bill creates a “cybersecurity exception” to every federal and state law that allows private companies to share Americans’ private communications with the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, the CIA and basically any other federal agency that requests it. The Lungren bill, by contrast, limits all of the sharing to the Department of Homeland Security, a civilian agency—and this is an important distinction. The DoD’s Cybercommand, along with the NSA, are notoriously secretive and not subject to many of the transparency rules in place at DHS.

This takes the nation’s cybersecurity efforts—and all of the very delicate monitoring that goes with it—and transfers it to the military and away from civilian control.

Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/167337/house-will-consider-disturbing-cybersecurity-bill