Statement By HPSCI Chairman Mike Rogers and Ranking Member C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger

On the President’s Executive Order

“We are pleased to hear that the President will mention cyber security in tonight’s State of the Union Address.  We will closely review the President’s executive order once it is released but we agree that our biggest barriers to bolster our cyber defenses can be fixed only with legislation.  That’s why we will introduce tomorrow our legislation to help U.S. companies better protect themselves, and the privacy and civil liberties of their customers, from Chinese and Iranian hackers.  Our bipartisan legislation passed the House last year and we look forward to working with the White House and the Senate on swift action this year.”

Rogers & Ruppersberger to Reintroduce Cybersecurity Bill to Protect the American Economy

 

  Chairman Mike Rogers and Ranking Member C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger announced last week that they will re-introduce their bipartisan cyber threat information sharing legislation tomorrow, Wednesday, February 13, to help American businesses better protect their computer networks and intellectual property from advanced cyber attacks.  The introduction of this vital bill will be accompanied by a joint speech by Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Ruppersberger at 1:30 pm the same day at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.  The bill introduced next week will be identical to the “Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act” (H.R. 3523) that passed the House by a strong bipartisan vote of 248-168 in April 2012.  

This important legislation, which had 112 bipartisan cosponsors in the last Congress, will:

• Allow the Federal government to provide classified cyber threat information to the private sector to allow American companies to better protect themselves from advanced cyber threats; 
• Empower American businesses to share anonymous cyber threat information with others in the private sector and enable the private sector to share information with the government on a purely voluntary basis, all while providing strong protections for privacy and civil liberties;
• Provides liability protection for companies that choose to protect their own networks or share threat information. 

This bipartisan legislation was developed in close consultation with a broad range of private sector companies, trade groups, privacy and civil liberties advocates, and the Executive Branch. 

Chairman Rogers said:  “This is clearly not a theoretical threat - the recent spike in advanced cyber attacks against the banks and newspapers makes that crystal clear.  American businesses are under siege. We need to provide American companies the information they need to better protect their networks from these dangerous cyber threats.  It is time to stop admiring this problem and deal with it immediately.  Congress urgently needs to pass our cyber threat information sharing bill to protect our national security, our economy, and U.S. jobs.”

"American industry is under attack, costing our country and our economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.  We need to do everything we can to enable American companies to defend themselves against these devastating cyber attacks.  Our bill does just that by permitting the voluntary sharing of critical threat intelligence while preserving important civil liberties," said Ranking Member C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger.

The bill’s strong protections for privacy and civil liberties include:

• Narrow definitions that permit only the voluntary sharing by the private sector of a limited category of information—cyber threat information—and only for cybersecurity purposes; 

• Strict restrictions on the government’s use, retention, and searching of any data voluntarily shared by the private sector;
• Permitting individuals to sue the government in federal court for violations of the bill’s privacy restrictions;
• Requiring the independent Intelligence Community Inspector General to conduct a detailed review of the government’s use of any information voluntarily shared by the private sector, and provide an unclassified report to Congress;
• A sunset for the bill’s authorities in five years, requiring Congress to carefully review the use of the authorities provided under the legislation to determine whether they should be extended or modified.

By allowing the private sector to share cyber threat information, and employ classified information to protect its networks, this bill will harness private sector drive and innovation while also keeping the government out of the business of monitoring and guarding private sector networks. 

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