Through several cybersecurity efforts, the federal government is taking on the challenges of establishing governance, government authority and international standards, said federal officials and cybersecurity experts Tuesday at a Symantec symposium in Washington. The White House domestic and international cybersecurity plans, pending legislation and a House working group are major developments in moving toward improving network security, they said.
BRUSSELS -- Europe got it right by coordinating wireless standards for 3G, but 10 years later has lost its dominance because of a lack of spectrum, U.S. Ambassador to the EU William Kennard said Tuesday at the annual European spectrum management conference. Europe’s information and communications technology market is about the same size as the U.S.’s, but with 200 million more people, it’s underperforming, he said. He floated the idea of pan-European spectrum auctions but said political pressures must be surmounted before that can happen. Others questioned whether Europe-wide auctions are the answer.
The following hearings, markups, or meetings are scheduled for June 14, 2011:
The following are the trade-related hearings scheduled for June 13-18, 2011:
EU governments agreed on a general policy for dealing with cyberattacks. The conclusions approved June 10 by justice ministers responded to a European Commission proposal seeking to update existing rules; build on the Council of Europe cybercrime convention; boost prevention of cyberassaults; and improve cooperation among national authorities in this area, the Justice and Home Affairs Council said. The new rules retain most of the current provisions penalizing illegal access to computers, system interference and data interference as well as aiding and abetting those crimes, it said. But the proposal also: (1) Makes it illegal to produce and make available tools such as malicious software designed to create botnets for committing the offenses. (2) Criminalizes illegal interception of computer data. (3) Strengthens existing 24/7 contact points among governments. (4) Requires the collection of basic statistical data on cybercrimes. The EC also proposed hiking penalties to a maximum jail time of two years, unless an attack is against a significant number of IT systems, in which case the maximum is three years, the council said. If the attack is the work of organized crime or caused serious damage, it said, the maximum will be five years. The new forms of aggravating circumstances are intended to address the emerging threats posed by large-scale cyberattacks, it said. Also Friday, the EC said Europe took an “important step” toward countering the threat of cybercrime against EU institutions by setting up a computer emergency response pre-configuration team made up of IT experts from those bodies. After a year’s preparatory work, the EU will decide what conditions are needed to establish a full-scale CERT, the EC said.
The following are trade-related highlights of the Executive Communications sent to Congress on June 6-9, 2011:
The FCC and Federal Emergency Management Agency will conduct the first “top to bottom” nationwide test of the emergency alert system on Nov. 9 at 2 p.m. EST, both agencies said Thursday. The test is expected to last up to three and a half minutes. The government will base the national test on two EAS tests the government recently conducted in Alaska (CD Feb 3 p5).
TerreStar is in “active discussions” with interested bidders, the company said in a court notification of a bankruptcy auction delay filed late Tuesday. Bids for TerreStar’s assets were originally due Wednesday. TerreStar’s filing pushes the bid deadline back a week to June 15 and the auction to June 22. The TerreStar bankruptcy is one of several moving parts involved in what will happen in the S-band.
The price of public safety legislation is a major concern for Senate Communications Subcommittee Ranking Member Jim DeMint, R-S.C., going into Wednesday’s markup of S-911 in the Senate Commerce Committee. While the bill by Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, promises to send $10 billion to the U.S. Treasury, the bill’s cost could be an issue for other budget hawks as well, telecom industry lobbyists said. Meanwhile, public safety pushed back against a campaign to add language requiring interoperability across the 700 MHz band.
A U.S.-Canada bi-national coalition of manufacturing associations and companies, the Businesses for a Better Border (B3), has sent a letter to both the governments of Canada and the U.S. to provide input into the February 2011 declaration by President Obama and Prime Minister Harper on “Beyond the Border: Shared Vision for Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness.”