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House intel committee to vote on CISPA in April

The House intelligence committee will vote on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known as CISPA, next month. "It will be coming out of the committee in April, it is a continuing work in progress, we are still meeting with privacy groups, still meeting with industry folks," said committee chairman Mike Rogers during ...

By John Reed

March 28, 2013, 4:48 PM

The House intelligence committee will vote on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, better known as CISPA, next month.

"It will be coming out of the committee in April, it is a continuing work in progress, we are still meeting with privacy groups, still meeting with industry folks," said committee chairman Mike Rogers during a breakfast in Washington this morning.

Remember, numerous organizations from the White House to the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have opposed the bill, saying it would violate citizens’ privacy rights. The bill died last year after the White House threatened a veto over privacy concerns.

"We want a bill that the American people can have faith and confidence in, that it is working for them, not against them, and [to allay concerns] that it is a surveillance program, which it is not," said Rogers. "We want to make sure that we meet the level of privacy concerns, and we think we can do that by working in some very direct language that expresses, in language, what we believe the bill already does but we want to reiterate that."

Rogers added that the committee and the White House may have had a "break-through" regarding its privacy concerns this week. He would not elaborate.

"I think we’ve got them [the White House] to a place where they’re interested in working with us to get something that we can get signed into the law,’ added Rogers.

While the White House is concerned about the bill infringing on privacy rights, executive branch officials have said that legislation allowing private businesses to share information with each other and the government is needed to augment the White House’s cyber security executive order.

The executive order authorizes government intelligence and law enforcement agencies to share threat information with businesses but not the other way around; only legislation can require that.

A key tenet of such legislation would be giving businesses immunity from lawsuits for sharing personal information about private citizens or violating antitrust statutes when sharing cyber security information. (Click here to learn more about the type of information that the government wants to share.)

Without "robust" liability protection, "this won’t work," said Rogers of any attempt private sector information sharing.

Rogers and the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Dutch Ruppersburger said when re-launching the bill last month that they are working with the White House to avoid another veto threat.

He added that his committee has also garnered "a lot more democratic support" in the Senate than it did last year.

Rogers told reporters after the breakfast that CISPA is only the first of many cyber-related legislative projects that will emerge this year. Stay tuned to Killer Apps for more on this today.

John Reed is a national security reporter for Foreign Policy. He comes to FP after editing Military.com’s publication Defense Tech and working as the associate editor of DoDBuzz. Between 2007 and 2010, he covered major trends in military aviation and the defense industry around the world for Defense News and Inside the Air Force. Before moving to Washington in August 2007, Reed worked in corporate sales and business development for a Swedish IT firm, The Meltwater Group in Mountain View CA, and Philadelphia, PA. Prior to that, he worked as a reporter at the Tracy Press and the Scotts Valley Press-Banner newspapers in California. His first story as a professional reporter involved chasing escaped emus around California’s central valley with Mexican cowboys armed with lassos and local police armed with shotguns. Luckily for the giant birds, the cowboys caught them first and the emus were ok. A New England native, Reed graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a dual degree in international affairs and history.