Committee Hearings – Week of 10-22-17

With both the House and Senate in Washington at the same time for the first time in two weeks, the most interesting congressional actions are taking place behind closed doors as the HR 2810 conference committee starts to work out the differences between the two versions of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. On the public side, there will be three cybersecurity hearings this week that may be of specific interest to readers of this blog.

Cybersecurity

On Tuesday two subcommittees of the House Homeland Security Committee will hold a joint hearing on “Public-Private Solutions to Educating a Cyber Workforce”. A witness list is not yet available for this hearing. The Committee has a number of bills pending that address this topic.

On Wednesday the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on “Assessing the Risk of Kaspersky Lab Products to the Federal Government”. The witness list includes:

• Donna Dodson, National Institute of Standards and Technology;

• David Shive, General Services Administration;

• James Norton, Play-Action Strategies LLC; and

• Sean Kanuck, International Institute for Strategic Studies

Kaspersky has volunteered to testify before this type of hearing. News reports indicate that he will probably appear at a future date as part of an on-going review of this topic by the Committee. I expect that at some point both the FBI and DHS will make similar appearances.

On Thursday the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on “Cyber Technology and Energy Infrastructure”. No witness list is currently available.

On the Floor

The House will take up two cybersecurity bills this week under the suspension of the rules provision. This means there will be limited debate and no floor amendments. More importantly, it typically indicates that the House leadership expects to see substantial bipartisan support for the bills since these rules require a 75% supermajority to pass the bill. The two cybersecurity related bills are:

• HR 4038 (today), the DHS Accountability Enhancement Act; and

• HR 3101 (Tuesday), the Strengthening Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Coordination in Our Ports Act of 2017