On the recordApril 17, 2013
Chairman Rogers and I are here today to discuss the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, known as CISPA. The bill simply allows the government to give cyber threat intelligence to the private sector to protect its networks from cyber attacks. I don't want to repeat a lot of what the chairman has said, but the first thing I want to do is to acknowledge the leadership of the chairman. Three years ago, the chairman and I, when we took over the leadership of the House Select Intelligence Committee, realized how serious the threat of cyber attacks were to our country, to our businesses, to our health, safety, and welfare. We decided to pull together a group of representatives from different parts of this issue--we had the administration involved, we had the privacy groups involved, including the ACLU, we brought in the industry--because we knew that we had to put together a bill that would pass the House, the Senate and be signed by the President. So, what we attempted to do was get input, and then we put together a bill. And, by the way, the bill is only 27 pages--it's probably a record in this Congress--and we did read the bill. Now, what we attempted to do in this bill is to address a situation where now, the government cannot really communicate with the private sector to try to help protect our citizens, our businesses from cyber attacks.…
