House GOP Leaders Push CISPA, Omit PrECISE Act in Cyberweek Vote Schedule
House GOP leaders plan to consider four cybersecurity bills during their much-anticipated “cyberweek,” they said Friday. The four bills are: the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) (HR-3523), the Federal Information Security Amendments Act (HR-4257), the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act (HR-2096), and the Advancing America’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Act (HR-3834).
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The House will consider HR-2096, HR-3834, and HR-4257 beginning Thursday at noon, said a spokeswoman for Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va. Also on Thursday the House will begin consideration of CISPA and the last votes of the week “are expected no later than” 3 p.m. on Friday, Cantor’s spokeswoman said.
The House will not consider HR-3624, the Promoting and Enhancing Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Effectiveness (PrECISE) Act, despite the legislation undergoing major revisions intended to make the bill more palatable to critics in industry (CD April 19 p8). Cantor’s spokeswoman told us the bill was omitted because “Democrats have made it clear that many of their members wouldn’t support this provision.”
The author of the PrECISE Act, House Cybersecurity Subcommittee Chairman Dan Lungren, R-Calif., suggested that House GOP leadership pressured him to gut the bill’s regulatory provisions during last week’s Homeland Security Committee markup of the bill. Specifically he removed language that would authorize the Department of Homeland Security to develop and regulate risk-based performance standards for the nation’s core critical infrastructure.
The four other bills are key to promoting economic growth and job creation, said Cantor, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and the leader of the House Republican Cybersecurity Task Force, Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas. They said the bills will encourage information sharing and cybersecurity incentives, rather than federal mandates -- provisions that are consistent with the task force’s initial recommendations.
CISPA garnered broad industry support and 112 co-sponsors because it strengthens liability protections for companies which share threat signatures with federal cybersecurity agencies. But the bill has endured criticism from the White House for failing to create cybersecurity standards, and from civil liberties groups who say the information sharing provisions could encourage federal monitoring of private communications.
CTIA reaffirmed its support for CISPA in a blog post Friday that called the bill the “single most important thing Congress can do to help improve our nation’s cybersecurity profile and protections for its citizens” (http://xrl.us/bm4muq). CTIA Vice President-Government Affairs Jot Carpenter said the bill will promote information sharing “with appropriate privacy protections, as well as with the sort of immunity from lawsuits that will genuinely incent sharing of cyber threat information that will help our nation get ahead of the challenge.” USTelecom also reaffirmed its support for the bill, which it said would increase the nation’s ability to “shore up its cyber defenses, while avoiding an overly regulatory approach.”
The other three bills aim to enhance protections and improve procedures around the Federal Information Security Management Act; increase U.S. cybersecurity research and development; and strengthen agency participation in the National High-Performance Computing Program.