HR 4364 Introduced – FY 2024 Legislative Branch Spending

Back in June, Rep Amodei (R,NV) introduced HR 4364, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2024. At the same time, the House Appropriations Committee published their Report on the bill. While there are a couple of cybersecurity mentions in the bill, they are entirely (and legitimately) focused on protecting the information technology systems used by members of congress. There is one building control system security mention in the Report (pg 19); a $2.1 million listing for “BASnet Cybersecurity Hardware and Network Programming Upgrades”.

Moving Forward

The House Rules Committee will be meeting on Monday afternoon to formulate the rule for the consideration of this bill, along with HR 4394 [removed from paywall], the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies [EWR] Appropriations Act, 2024. To date, only one amendment has been proposed for the Committee’s consideration. This bill normally gets substantial bipartisan support and this year should be no different.

Commentary

Okay, I have to mention this because it is video surveillance related. The one amendment proposed to the House Rules Committee was submitted by Rep Massie (R,KY). The amendment reads:

“No funds appropriated in this bill shall be used to allow the department of defense (sic) to install or operate cameras on the Capitol complex.”

Just a tad bit of paranoia showing? Besides if an outside agency (and DOD would not be my first suspect) would use their own funds to install such a camera network (if they did not just hack the current security camera system) and if the capital security folks were compromised sufficiently to allow such installation, it would not take any ‘funding’ from Congress to ‘allow’ the installation. Of course, seeing the poor-quality camera images from Saturday’s FireAlarmGate incident, maybe Congress should get DOD to install their internal surveillance systems. DOD certainly has access to better quality cameras.