Bills Introduced – 10-01-15

On Thursday there were 49 bills introduced in the House and Senate. Of these only three may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

HR 3664 To provide for the identification and documentation of best practices for cyber hygiene by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and for other purposes. Rep. Eshoo, Anna G. [D-CA-18]

HR 3669 To amend title 18, United States Code, to provide a criminal penalty for operating drones in certain locations, and for other purposes. Rep. Garamendi, John [D-CA-3]

S 2121 A bill to facilitate and enhance the declassification of information, including in the Legislative Branch, and for other purposes.

HR 3664 sounds to be too generic to be of specific interest here, but that “for other purposes” phrase tacked on the end could hide some interesting stuff.

I suspect that the types of ‘certain locations’ called for in the HR 3669 will not include critical infrastructure, but we will have to wait for publication to be sure.

Without knowing who the sponsor of S 2121 is (see the note below) it is hard to gauge what this bill is really attempting to do. I will take a look at it when it is published because of the potential to effect government information sharing with the private sector.

NOTE: The Congress.gov web site seems to be having some sort of problem today. They were very late in getting the list of bills introduced yesterday published today. Even then a number of the House bills and none of the Senate bills provided sponsor information; they reported “Sponsor information not received”. I’m pretty sure that this will get worked out.

OMB Receives Declassification Final Rule

Yesterday the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that it had received for review the final rule for Declassification of National Security Information from the National Archives and Records Administration. This rule would implement changes to the National Security Information declassification processes mandated by §3.7 of EO 13526.

Actually, I think that this OMB announcement may be in error, I believe that this was the notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) not the final rule that was submitted. According to the Spring 2011 Unified Agenda the NPRM was supposed to have been published in June, but I can find no record on the RegInfo.gov web site that it was.

This rule may be of interest to the chemical security community because of its derivative impact on DHS implementation of EO 13549 (Classified National Security Information Program for State, Local, Tribal, and Private Sector Entities [including fusion centers]) and potentially the sharing of intelligence information with the chemical security community.