Bills Introduced – 06-11-15

There were 43 bills introduced in the House and Senate yesterday. Of those only one may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

S 1558 An original bill making appropriations for Department of Defense for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2016, and for other purposes. Sen. Cochran, Thad [R-MS]

This bill will almost certainly be the one considered in the Senate and then its language will be transferred to HR 2685. A conference committee will likely be required to work out the differences between the two bills.

HR 2685 Amended and Passed in House

This morning the House finished their consideration of the FY 2016 DOD spending bill, HR 2685. The original bill contained no specific mention of cybersecurity issues, but one amendment made proposed last night attempted to change that. The bill was adopted this morning on a partially bipartisan vote of 278 to 149. Five Republicans and 43 Democrats crossed party lines on the vote.

The cybersecurity amendment was offered by Rep. Grayson (D,FL) {CREC, 06-10-15, pg H4125}. It addressed the issue of collaboration between NSA and NIST and was intended to prevent a re-occurrence of the reported NIST compromise on security issues at the behest of NSA. As Grayson noted on the floor:

“The amendment seeks to prohibit the intelligence community from subverting or interfering with the integrity of any cryptographic standard that is proposed, developed, or adopted by NIST.”

The amendment was ultimately defeated in a voice vote.

Bills Introduced – 06-05-15

Neither the House nor Senate was is session on Friday, but there was one bill introduced in the House in any case:

HR 2685  Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2016. Rep. Frelinghuysen, Rodney P. [R-NJ-11]

I have had a chance to do a quick once-through on the bill and there are no specific mentions of cybersecurity. The bill will be considered during the coming week in the Full House; probably under an open amendment process. So, we may see cybersecurity issues added.