Review - HR 9769 Introduced – Chinese Cyber Threats

Last month, Rep Lee (R,FL) introduced HR 9769, the Strengthening Cyber Resilience Against State-Sponsored Threats Act. The bill would require CISA to establish an interagency task force to “detect, analyze, and respond to the cybersecurity threat posed by State-sponsored cyber actors, including Volt Typhoon, of the People’s Republic of China”. The task force would submit annual classified reports to Congress. No new funding is authorized by this legislation.

Moving Forward

On September 25^th, the House Homeland Security Committee conducted a business meeting where twenty pieces of legislation were considered. Among them was HR 9769, which was passed by a voice vote. This means that there is substantial bipartisan support for the bill. This will probably clear the way for the bill to be considered by the full House under the suspension of the rules process; limiting debate, prohibiting floor amendments and requiring a super majority vote for passage.

Commentary

There is no mention of the intelligence community in either the composition of the task force or provision of intelligence information in support of the Task Force’s information collection. While CISA and the FBI will have some internally developed information on the topic of Chinese cybersecurity threats, the bulk (and widest scope) of such information will be held by the intelligence community. I suspect that this was deliberately overlooked by the crafters of the bill to avoid sharing congressional oversight with (or even surrendering it to) the House Intelligence Committee.

 

For more information on the provisions of this bill, including some additional commentary, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/hr-9769-introduced - subscription required.