House Homeland Security Committee approved a measure to renew the Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Act of 2015, preserving liability protections for private-sector threat intelligence sharing. The law currently is set to lapse Sept. 30 and the proposed WIMWIG Act would extend it for ten years and advance to the full House. Committee technical amendments met little pushback, though Rep. Bennie Thompson criticized the expedited vetting and limited public release of the bill text. Some Republicans expressed concerns that CISA could censor protected speech, and Sen. Rand Paul intends to add language barring alleged censorship in the Senate reauthorization.
The original law, the Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Act of 2015, lets private sector providers freely transmit cyber threat intelligence to government partners with key liability protections in place. It's set to lapse Sept. 30 unless renewed by Congress. The extension, dubbed the Widespread Information Management for the Welfare of Infrastructure and Government, or WIMWIG, Act, extends the law another ten years. It now moves to the full House for consideration.
Technical amendments were introduced to the bill, which were met with little pushback in committee, though Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., the panel's ranking member, criticized the process undertaken by committee chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., to vet changes to the legislation. Thompson said the process was "cut short unnecessarily" and that the text of the bill was made public for the first time only 48 hours before the markup.
Top of mind for some Republicans on the panel were concerns that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would be enabled to censor Americans' protected speech. That concern extends to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, where Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., a First Amendment hawk, has said he'd add language in the high chamber's version of the reauthorization that would bar the cyber agency from carrying out alleged censorship of free speech.
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