Review - S 903 Introduced – Civil Cyber Reserve Pilot

Last month, Sen Rosen (D,NV) introduced S 903, the Department of Defense Civilian Cybersecurity Reserve Act. The bill would require the Army to carry out a pilot project to establish a Civilian Cybersecurity Reserve. No additional funding is authorized by the bill. The provisions of the bill are very similar to S 885, which was also introduced by Rosen.

Differences from S 885

The most obvious difference from S 885 is that this bill authorizes the Army to establish a CCR pilot to support the United States Cyber Command and the earlier bill was designed to assist CISA with cybersecurity operations. This difference leads to a number of minor administrative changes, like which congressional committees are involved the reporting process.

There is one other significant difference between the two bills. This bill does not include a definition of the term ‘significant incident’ that was found in the DHS version. So, instead of helping to respond to a significant incident the purpose of the Army version of the CCR would be to help Cyber Command to:

• Preempt, defeat, deter, or respond to malicious cyber activity,

• Conduct cyberspace operations,

• Secure information and systems of the Department of Defense against malicious cyber activity, and

• Assist in solving cyber workforce-related challenges.

Interestingly, also missing from the DOD version of this bill is any description of the components to be considered in the study on the design and implementation of the pilot project. A discussion of those topics was included in the CISA bill.

Moving Forward

Rosen is a member of the Senate Armed Forces Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration. This means that there may be enough influence to see this bill considered in Committee. With no funding authorization included, I see nothing in this bill that would engender any organized opposition to the bill. I suspect that the bill would receive bipartisan support in Committee if it were considered. Having said that, the Senate Homeland Security Committee did not take up S 885 as it was scheduled to do last month, so there may be some objections to these programs of which I am not aware.

 

For more details about the provisions of the bill, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/s-903-introduced - subscription required.