Tag Archive for: Legislation

Proposed encryption legislation: What you need to know

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The first draft of long awaited federal encryption legislation that would govern to what lengths vendors and service providers have to go in order to comply with court decryption orders has finally been released.

It takes a stab at defining how to give law enforcement the authority to access encrypted information and under what circumstances that is OK. It also tells vendors and service providers to what lengths they would have to go to help out.

The proposal has not been filed formally as a bill in Congress, but its release will generate discussion.

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Network World Tim Greene

CISA legislation would lift liability for businesses sharing cyber threat information

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A bill that encourages businesses to share threat intelligence with each other and the government is closer to becoming a law than it has been for years now that it offers businesses near immunity from liability if the data they share is stolen and causes harm, but such sharing is still fraught with problems.

The proposed Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) proposal doesn’t force anyone to participate in sharing, but it creates incentives for businesses to do so willingly, says Nathan Taylor, a partner in the law firm Morrison & Foerster, who is following the bill as it wends its way through Congress.

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Network World Security

US legislation requiring tech industry to report terrorist activity dropped

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The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has dropped a provision that would have required Internet companies to report on vaguely-defined terrorist activity on their platforms, a move that was strongly opposed by the industry and civil rights groups.

The controversial section 603 was included in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016 but Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, had put a hold on the bill, stating that he wanted to work with colleagues to revise or remove the provision so that the rest of the bill could move forward.

On Monday, Wyden said that the “vague & dangerous” provision had been removed from the bill and he would now be lifting the hold on it.

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Network World Security

Louisiana governor vetoes license plate reader legislation

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Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has vetoed legislation that would provide for the pilot use of automatic license plate readers by law enforcement to identify stolen vehicles and uninsured motorists.

Like GPS trackers on vehicles and so-called Stingrays or “IMSI catchers” that track the location of mobile phones by mimicking cellphone towers, automatic license plate readers have become a controversial privacy issue, with many civil rights groups opposing their indiscriminate use.

In a letter, explaining his decision to return the bill to the state Senate, Jindal said the personal information captured by the automatic license plate reader cameras, which includes a person’s vehicle location, would be retained in a central database and accessible to not only law enforcement agencies but also to private entities for a period of time, regardless of whether or not the system detects that a person is in violation of vehicle insurance rules.

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Network World Security