Dutch Ruppersberger: “I have no more speakers, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. First thing, there were some comments that I…”

“I have no more speakers, and I yield myself such time as I may consume. First thing, there were some comments that I would like to respond to. First thing, this bill does not allow the wholesale violation of privacy rights. This bill is extremely important to our national security, but also important to our citizens of this great country, our privacy rights, and civil liberties. The chairman and I have taken this very seriously, as have the members of our caucus. We know this is not a perfect bill--there will probably be additional changes. We will have more debate later on this afternoon. Now, some of the things I want to address. During the drafting of this legislation we put forward a wide range of privacy protections. We worked for the last year with the White House, privacy groups, and business groups to come to a coalition to make sure that we get this bill right. First, the bill severely limits what kind of information can be shared with the government. Only information directly pertaining to the threat can be shared, which is mostly formulas, X's and O's of the virus code. It's almost something that the companies deal with now in dealing with spam. Second, the bill encourages companies to voluntarily strip out personal information that may be associated with these zeroes and ones. Occasionally, that does occur, and we have to deal with that, and we'll continue to deal with that issue. There also are strong use limitations on the data.…”