S 1867 Introduced – DOD Authorization Bill

The Senate has apparently given up work on HR 2354 due to internal political squabbles and has now started work on the DOD authorization bill for FY 2012. Not content with the three bills that had been introduced in the Senate earlier this year covering the same subject (S 0981, S 1253, and S 1254) Sen. Levin (D,MI) this week introduced S 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012.

BTW: Levin, the Chair of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, introduced all three previous versions of this bill.

Cybersecurity Provisions

There are four cyber security provisions in this new bill, but they are substantially the same as those found in S 1253. I discussed them in some detail in my blog on that bill’s introduction. The section titles are:

• Section 913. Review to identify interference with national security global positioning system receivers by commercial communications services [LightSquared provision];

• Section 931. Strategy to acquire capabilities to detect previously unknown cyber-attacks;

• Section 932. Program in support of department of defense policy on sustaining and expanding information sharing [WikiLeaks prevention]; and

• Section 1076. Study on the recruitment, retention, and development of cyberspace experts.

I haven’t had a chance to peruse the Committee Report on this new bill yet, but I would bet it contains substantially the same cyber security discussions found in the report from the S 1253. I did a write-up of that earlier report that might be interesting to re-read here.

Amendments to S 1867

As one would expect for an authorization bill for an agency as large and controversial as DOD, there are a lot of amendments that have been introduced for this bill. I’ll probably be doing a couple of blog posts on the amendments that would affect the chemical and cyber security communities.

One, however, did catch my attention as I was scanning the list; Amendment S 1229, introduced Friday by Sen. McCain (R,AZ). It would add §1088, “Cybersecurity collaboration between the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security”, which would define the cybersecurity relationship between DOD and DHS.

There are not a lot of details in this amendment, but it would require the two departments to exchange officials to aid in the coordination of their efforts.