With both the House and Senate in session this week we start
to see movement on other things than just spending bills. We have two
cybersecurity hearings of potential interest and HR 6237, the FY 2018/19 intel
authorization bill.
Spending Bills
• Wednesday – House – Committee - Labor, Health
and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies
Cybersecurity
On Wednesday the House Homeland Security Committee will be
holding a
hearing on “DHS’s Progress In Securing Election Systems And Other Critical
Infrastructure”. The witness list includes:
• Christopher Krebs, DHS; and
• Nellie Gorbea, State of Rhode Island
While securing the election process is certainly important
it is generally outside of the scope of this blog. I am mentioning this hearing
though because of the following statement on the hearing web site:
“The hearing will also provide
Members an opportunity to hear about DHS’s role working across all 16 critical
infrastructure sectors because a cyber threat to elections may pose a similar
threat to other critical infrastructure sectors.”
It will be interesting to hear what questions the Committee
has for Krebs.
On Wednesday the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation
will hold a
hearing on “Complex Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities: Lessons Learned from
Spectre and Meltdown”. The witness list includes:
• Donna Dodson, NIST;
• José-Marie Griffiths, Dakota
State University;
• Joyce Kim, ARM;
• Art Manion, Carnegie Mellon
University; and
• Sri Sridharan, University of
South Florida
This is potentially too complex a topic for a congressional
hearing. I hope the witnesses take this into account and concentrate on policy
type issues instead of the technical details. It will be interesting to see
what questions are posed by the Senators; this will reflect on the quality of
the technical support the committee has.
Intelligence Authorization Act
On Wednesday the House Rules Committee will hold a
hearing to set the rule for the consideration of HR
6237, the Matthew Young Pollard Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal
Years 2018 and 2019. Thirty-seven
amendments have been submitted to the Committee for consideration for
inclusion in the debate on HR 6237. None of those amendments should be of
specific interest to readers of this blog.
Last year’s version of the bill, HR
3180, finally
passed the House under a closed rule (limited debate, no amendments),
but was never considered in the Senate. It will be interesting to see how the
Committee deals with this bill this year. The bill is scheduled to come to the
floor on Thursday.
On the Floor
In addition to HR 3180, the House will also take up HR
5729, the Transportation Worker Identification Credential Accountability
Act of 2018. That bill will be considered tomorrow under the suspension of the
rules process; limited debate, no amendments, and a super-majority to pass. The
bill will almost certainly pass with wide bipartisan support.
As I noted in my post on S
3094, the companion bill to HR 5729, from reading the Committee Report on
the bill it is clear that the impetus for proposing this bill was to ‘punish’
DHS and the Coast Guard for ignoring the dictates of Congress. That will not,
however, be the basis for the wide spread support for the bill. It provides a
wide variety of congress critters a chance to vote against the TWIC program
(for an equally wide variety of reasons) without taking any real action to
affect the program. They get a show vote for certain constituencies without
having to negatively effect a security program. You cannot get a better bill
for politicians.
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