Congressional Hearings – Week of 6-18-12

This week the House is back in Washington, but even with both houses of Congress in town we have to stretch some to find hearings that might be of interest to the chemical security and cybersecurity readers of this blog. There is another appropriations hearing and a look at the security clearance process.

Spending Bill

The House Appropriations Committee will be holding their final markup of the Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development Appropriations Bill on Tuesday. There will be nothing here directly mentioning security, either cyber or chemical, but there could chemical safety issues addressed that could have a potential to affect facility security matters; or maybe not. The Appropriations Committee gets proactive about the oddest things.

Security Clearances

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs will be holding a hearing on Thursday on security clearance reform. While there is no current provision in law or regulation requiring critical infrastructure organizations (outside of the defense industry sector) to have personnel hold security clearances, that is likely to change as it becomes for obvious that many such industries will potentially be subject to serious cyber-attack. Providing those entities access to classified intelligence information, necessary for their internal security programs, will require large numbers of security clearances to be issued. No witness list is available yet.