HR 3990 Introduced – Cybersecurity

As I noted last week Rep. Shea-Porter (D,NH) introduced HR 3990, the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2014. This is a companion bill to S 1897 introduced by Sen. Leahy (D,NH). The bill deals mainly with the protection of personally identifiable information, but it does contain one section (§109) that makes it a criminal act to damage critical infrastructure computers, including control system computers. Different versions of this section have been found in other bills as well (HR 1468 for instance).

There is one oddity in the Leahy-Shea-Porter version of the bill; the definition of critical infrastructure includes “electrical power delivery systems;” while other versions expand on that to include “electrical power generation and delivery systems;”. This ‘oddity’ should be corrected in committee markup.