Senate Intel panel passes cybersecurity bill

The Senate Intelligence Committee passed a controversial cybersecurity bill 14-1 during a markup Thursday, a move that Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) called “historic.”

“I have all the confidence in the world going to [Senate Majority Leader] McConnell and asking him for this to be expedited on the Senate floor,” Burr told reporters after the vote.

{mosads}The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) would enhance the sharing of information about cybersecurity threats between the private sector and government agencies by granting liability protections to companies offering the data.

“This has been a long road,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the panel who has been pushing versions of CISA for several years.

Government officials and most industry groups argue the bill is necessary to mitigate the impact of cyberattacks, which have hit giant retailers like Target and Home Depot, major banks like JPMorgan, and Anthem, the nation’s second-largest health insurer.

If CISA had been in place, “I think we might have minimized what happened at Anthem, we might have minimized what happened at Home Depot,” Burr said. “But certainly we would have made sure that elsewhere in the industry, there wouldn’t have been a threat because federal government would have responded.”

But the measure has drawn the ire of the privacy community, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the lone vote Thursday opposing CISA.

Opponents are worried the bill will create another outlet for the intelligence community to collect sensitive data on Americans.

In a statement Thursday, Wyden called CISA a “surveillance bill by another name.”

Similar White House and Democratic objections held up the bill’s markup for several weeks.

The Intel panel made several notable privacy concessions to address those concerns.

Feinstein said there were roughly 15 Democratic amendments related to privacy offered during the markup, 12 of which are in the final legislation, either in whole or in part.

CISA will not allow electronic, real-time sharing with intelligence agencies. If companies want to digitally exchange cyber threat data, they will have to go through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a civilian agency.

“Our preference is the electronic transfer through the DHS portal,” Burr stressed.

A White House cyber info-sharing proposal would have placed the DHS at the center of nearly all public-private threat data exchange.

Feinstein believes the changes will assuage the administration’s and other lawmakers’ concerns.

“I talked to the president’s chief of staff [Denis McDonough] yesterday,” Feinstein said. “I think he believes that a number of improvements have been made in the bill.”

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has been discussing an info-sharing bill this year that would mirror the White House proposal.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), ranking member on Homeland Security, even introduced a version of the administration’s proposal. But Committee Chairman Ron Johnson has chosen to defer to the Intelligence bill, calling it more “robust.”

Carper wrote to the Intelligence panel with concerns about its bill, as did Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a staunch opponent of increasing the intelligence community’s access to private data.

Feinstein said she had spoken with both senators about their hesitations.

“I think we’ve met most of those concerns,” Feinstein said. “There’s been a major effort to handle those in this bill.”

Discussing the privacy concessions, Burr said that Feinstein “has stretched me so far, I feel like I’ve had cosmetic surgery.”

In a statement, Carper said he was “encouraged by the bipartisan progress … made today,” but added that he had yet to read the bill’s full text.

“The only way we’re going to get this first step done is if it’s bipartisan,” Feinstein said.

The committee plans to bring the bill to the Senate floor for a vote shortly after the upcoming recess, which spans the last week of March through mid-April.

“I’ve learned never to try to forecast what’s going to happen in the United States Senate,” Burr said.