Senate Homeland Security pushed through a comprehensive cybersecurity reform bill last week. (Writeup; bill text). It appears that cyber, for now, remains one of the areas in which the parties can work productively together, as it is co-sponsored by a Republican (Collins), Democrat (Carper), and Weasel Independent (Lieberman).
It’s an interesting and important idea that the government recognizes that it has a role to play in securing our national networks. It’s a standard case for prudent regulation; with a role for Homeland Security, there’s more likely to be sensible rules set up to ensure that corporations meet certain due diligence requirements to keep the networks largely safe.
For corporations, security or safety is often seen as an expense to be avoided; in the event of a network disaster, the negligent malefactors are likely to suffer but there would be massive externalities that bourn by the people of the US.
Like, oh, this.*
Of course, having security in the hands of “protectors” means they have incentives to lock things down at the expense of privacy or openness. I’d hope to see a countervailing role for an agency which focuses on netizen rights.
There’s a lot of cybersecurity bills washing around Congress; if the fillibuster debate schedule permits, I expect we’ll see something significant passed this session.
* C. Warren Axelrod (can I call you Axe for short?) has explicitly focused on this analogy between the oil spill and cybersecurity.
