House Defies Obama Veto Threat in Passing Cyber Measure
By Eric Engleman - Apr 27, 2012 12:00 AM ET
The U.S. House of Representatives raised the stakes in a debate with the White House over how best to improve the nation’s cybersecurity, passing a bill President Barack Obama called too weak and threatened to veto.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act passed the House by 248 to 168 yesterday. The measure, introduced by Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee, encourages the government and companies to voluntarily share data on cyber threats and gives businesses legal immunity for such exchanges.
“We can’t stand by and do nothing as U.S. companies are hemorrhaging from the cyber looting coming from nation states like China and Russia,” Rogers said in an e-mailed statement after the vote. “America will be a little safer and our economy better protected from foreign cyber predators with this legislation.”
Lawmakers are debating cybersecurity legislation as fears intensify about the ability of cyber spies to steal U.S. intellectual property and the potential for digital disruption of vital U.S. infrastructure.
Hackers and illicit programmers in China and Russia are aggressively pursuing American technology and industrial secrets, jeopardizing an estimated $398 billion in U.S. research spending, the National Counterintelligence Executive, the agency responsible for countering foreign spying on the U.S. government, said in a November report.
‘Horrible Bill’
The Obama administration “strongly opposes” the Rogers bill in its current form, according to an April 25 policy statement issued by the Office of Management and Budget.
The administration said the measure doesn’t do enough to protect the nation’s critical systems from cyber attacks and would erode privacy safeguards for consumer information. Civil liberties groups initiated a Web protest against the legislation last week, saying it would let too much personal data flow to the government without limits on its use.
“As we’ve seen repeatedly, once the government gets expansive national security authorities, there’s no going back,” Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an e-mailed statement after the House vote. “We encourage the Senate to let this horrible bill fade into obscurity.”
The White House supports a bill from Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Independent, that would put the Department of Homeland Security in charge of regulating cybersecurity of the nation’s vital systems such as power grids and transportation networks. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, has pledged to bring the Lieberman bill to the Senate floor without giving a date.
more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-27/house-defies-obama-veto-threat-in-passing-cyber-measure.html
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