Bills Introduced – 07-31-18

Yesterday with the Senate in Washington and the House meeting in pro forma session there were 27 bills introduced. Of those, two may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

S 3309 A bill to authorize cyber incident response teams at the Department of Homeland Security, and for other purposes. Sen. Hassan, Margaret Wood [D-NH]

S 3311 A bill to amend title 18, United States Code, to prohibit interference with voting systems under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Sen. Blumenthal, Richard [D-CT]

With such teams already in existence it will be interesting to see the language of S 3309 to see if ICS-CERT is specifically mentioned (probably not) and to see if specific funding authority is provided for these teams.

Any time Congress messes with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, cybersecurity researchers need to pay attention. With the obvious interest in protecting voting systems from computer assault, it will be interesting to see how well Blumenthal protects the researchers who will be the ones finding the vulnerabilities.