Senate Moves Again to Advance Cybersecurity Legislation
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., sought to invoke cloture on the Cybersecurity Act (S-3414) Wednesday and asked Republicans to offer proposals to improve the bill. This summer, lawmakers failed to compromise on the provisions of S-3414 primarily due to opposition from Republicans and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said the legislation would create new and costly mandates for businesses (CD Aug 3 p3). Separately, the White House said President Barack Obama signed a presidential directive last month aimed at clarifying how law enforcement agencies and the military should react to cybersecurity attacks.
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"It’s imperative that Democrats and Republicans work together to address what national security experts have called ’the most serious challenge to our national security since the onset of the nuclear age sixty years ago,'” Reid said during a floor speech Wednesday. “On several occasions since Republicans filibustered the cybersecurity bill this summer, I have asked my colleagues to bring to me a list of amendments they would like to debate as we consider this legislation,” Reid said. “Today, they have yet another opportunity to do so.” The majority leader can move forward with the filibuster-ending cloture vote because of a procedural motion that kept the bill on the Senate calendar after Republicans filibustered the bill in July, Reid’s spokesman said. At our deadline a compromise had not yet been cemented between Senate Democrats and Republicans.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said S-3414’s survival depends entirely on whether Democrats and Republicans are able to come to an agreement over the amendments to the bill. “We want to have amendments. We have a set of five of them that we would like to see,” McCain told us without giving more specifics. In July, McCain and other sponsors of the alternative SECURE IT Act, proposed that their bill be added as an amendment in the nature of a substitute to S-3414, among a host of other amendments during the last floor debate over the bill (CD July 27 p5). SECURE IT is also sponsored by GOP Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Dan Coats of Indiana, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Richard Burr of North Carolina.
Senate passage of S-3414 continued to face potential opposition from at least one Senate Democrat. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., one of the six Democrats who voted against S-3414 in the summer, said he had not decided whether he will continue to oppose the legislation. His support hinges on whether the bill incorporates any amendments that offer privacy protections to citizens, he told us at the Capitol Wednesday. “I believe that it is possible to strike a balance, particularly with the intelligence community to fight terror relentlessly and still be sensitive to people’s personal liberties,” he said.
Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said in an interview at the Capitol that he hoped some Republicans would agree to move forward with the bill and offer relevant and germane amendments so the Senate can “debate them, vote on them and hopefully have the chance to pass a bill.” The primary difference between this week’s cloture vote and the vote in July is that “the administration has made it very clear that the president will use his executive powers to issue a directive to essentially achieve what was intended to be achieved in Title I of the bill,” Carper said. Title I of S-3414 aims to facilitate a better public-private partnership to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure (http://xrl.us/bnzovt). If the Senate does not agree to move forward with the bill, Carper said he plans to “continue to work very hard” to pass cybersecurity legislation in the next Congress.
A White House spokeswoman confirmed that Obama recently signed a new classified presidential directive related to cybersecurity. A Washington Post article Wednesday said that in mid-October the president signed Presidential Policy Directive 20 to clarify how the U.S. military, intelligence community and law enforcement agencies address cyberthreats to the nation’s cybernetworks. The new policy updates a 2004 presidential directive and is intended to address the evolving cyberthreat against U.S. networks, the spokeswoman said. The directive establishes “principles and processes for the use of cyberoperations so that cybertools are integrated with the full array of national security tools we have at our disposal,” the spokeswoman said. The directive does not change any of the actions the government currently takes to defend U.S. networks with the consent of private network owners, and is consistent with the U.S. Constitution, she said. “It continues to be our policy that we shall undertake the least action necessary to mitigate threats and that we will prioritize network defense and law enforcement as the preferred courses of action.”