Cyber-security legislation addressing some of the recommendations House Republicans unveiled last week will emerge in the coming days, a senior lawmaker said.
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) argued yesterday Congress should address the recommendations of the House Republican Cybersecurity Task Force, which he lead, during the current congressional session because they relate to jobs, which he dubbed the No. 1 issue on Capitol Hill.
“Cyber-security is directly related to jobs because every day that somebody reaches in to some business’ computer and sucks out intellectual property, they are sucking out jobs from the U.S. economy, and that is happening with businesses large and small and of all variations,” he said at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.
While many of the proposals in the group’s report, the Recommendations of the House Republican Cybersecurity Task Force, need to be further vetted by congressional committees that will craft future bills, some legislation will start to emerge this month, he said.
“In the next few days you will see a number of additional bills being introduced, because people had been drafting…legislation but wanted to wait the task force recommendations came out,” Thornberry told the think-tank audience. Members of the task force and other lawmakers have been working on legislative measures “that are consistent with” some of the recommendations, he said.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who created the task force, will coordinate the crafting of future legislation among the varied congressional committees, Thornberry said. The Republican leaders of the nine panels with cyber-related oversight all have signed off on the framework proposed by the task force, he said, though he acknowledged “we still could have trouble with the details.”
Thornberry said he is “reasonably optimistic” that something akin to the task force’s report can be turned into successful legislation.
The task force, made up of Republicans from the nine related committees, unveiled a series of recommendations last week including creating a new entity to help businesses and the government share information about cyber threats. The group’s report also calls for creating incentives to encourage companies to address cyber security, updating dozens out out-of-date laws that impact cyber issues, and clarifing government authorities including the role of the military in protecting the private sector in cyberspace (Defense Daily, Oct. 6).
It remains to be seen how the Democratic-controlled Senate will receive the coming cyber proposals from House Republicans. The task force’s recommendations received positive feedback from some Democrats including Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I/D-Conn.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Still, Thornberry made a jab at the pace of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) work in the area.
“The Senate majority leader has been working to assemble a bill for some years, more of a centralized sort of approach,” Thornberry said, saying he can’t predict how multiple House bills would mesh with a single Senate measure.
“The strong preference in the House is to work through the regular committee process, try to get the details right, and hope that working with the Senate, and the White House of course, that we can actually do something and not continue this sort of legislative gridlock that has come with this issue for far too long.”
Thornberry heard some concerns about potential cyber legislation during a question-and-answer session following his speech yesterday, including business’ concerns about protecting privacy in the task force’s proposed information-sharing entity.
He told reporters that the main criticism he has heard about the task force’s recommendations is that they “don’t solve all the problems of the world.” The framework generally does not call for wading into what he called “turf fights” about government reorganization, though it does call for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to assume formal responsibility for protecting the dot-gov domain.
“Some people want to have a cyber czar in the administration, make Department of Homeland Security (DHS) kind of the funnel through which all the private industry cyber plans have to go through,” he said. “A lot of the bureaucratic turf fighting I think has held up proposals in the past. So we just didn’t touch government reorganization,” except regarding DHS’s oversight of dot-gov, he said.