Tuesday, July 29, 2014

S 2519 Introduced – Cybersecurity Operations Center

As I noted earlier Sen. Carper (D,DE) introduced S 2519, the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) Act of 2014. This bill would add a new section {§210G} to the Homeland Security Act of 2002 formally establishing the existing NCCIC.

The mandate included in this bill is very wide and vaguely written. Two of the subparagraphs describing the functions of the NCCIC directly affect the effect the industrial control system community through the functions of the ICS-CERT which is part of the NCCIC:

• Sharing cybersecurity threat, vulnerability, impact, and incident information and analysis by and among Federal, State, and local government entities and private sector entities {§210G(a)(3)}; and
• Upon request, providing timely technical assistance to Federal and non-Federal entities with respect to cybersecurity threats and attribution, vulnerability mitigation, and incident response and remediation {§210G(a)(3)}.

Both of these (actually all of the) activities are clearly identified as discretionary:

The provision of assistance or information to, and inclusion in the operations center of, governmental or private entities under this section shall be at the discretion of the Under Secretary appointed under section 103(a)(1)(H) [Under Secretary for NPPD] {§210G(e)}.

The current organization of the NCCIC can be seen here on the NCCIC web site. An interesting side note; the link to this organizational chart provided on the NCCIC landing page is an editing link which leads to one of those nasty ‘Access Denied’ warnings.


This bill was ordered reported by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the day of its introduction. If this bill makes it to the floor it will certainly be approved, probably under the unanimous consent process in the Senate and under suspension of the rules in the House. It could also find its way into a spending bill. It all depends on the discretion of the leadership of the respective bodies. 

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