Yesterday the Senate continued consideration of S 2943, the
FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. An agreement was reached to
continue consideration on June 6th when the Senate returns from
their Memorial Day weekend. During the day yesterday a total of 134
amendments were offered for consideration. Two of those amendments may be
of specific interest to readers of this blog:
The Amendments
The two amendments of potential interest were
SA 4244 (pg S3302) – Sen. Reed
(D,RI) - SEC. 1097. Cybersecurity transparency.
SA 4303 (pg S3322) – Sen. Portman
(R,OH) - SEC. 526. Plan to meet the demand for cyberspace career fields in the
reserve components of the air force.
The Reed amendment is essentially identical to S
2410 introduced by Reed in December, 2015 establishing cybersecurity
expertise requirements for corporate boards. The language does specifically
include “industrial control systems, such as supervisory control and data
acquisition systems, distributed control systems, and programmable logic
controllers” {new §1097(a)(3)(B)}
in the definition of ‘information system’.
The Portman amendment would require the Air Force to report
to Congress on their plan “for meeting the increased demand for cyberspace
career fields in the reserve components of the Air Force, in accordance with
the recommendations of the National Commission on the Structure of the Air
Force” {new §526(a)}.
Moving Forward
The Senate has only reached agreement on the consideration
of one amendment so far (and it is not one of the amendments of concern here),
but I expect that we will see a lot more movement when the Senate returns.
Either of these two amendments could easily be adopted if they were to be
considered in the floor debate.
The Reed amendment is not really a DOD related topic, but
the Senate rules are quite generous about the topics that can be added in the
amendment process. It all depends on how much political will Reed and any other
amendment supporters can bring to bear on the Senate leadership.
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