A key Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) official on Thursday urged Congress to renew, by any means, a landmark digital threat-sharing law before it expires at the end of the month.
“Give us two years. Give us 10 years. Give us 50,” Nick Andersen, CISA’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity, told reporters on the sidelines of the Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington. “Obviously, we love stability for the organization and stability for our partners to understand how we’re going to protect and exchange information. But really, that’s up to Congress.”
Andersen’s comments come less than three weeks before the 2015 Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA 2015), which provides incentives for private entities to voluntarily share digital threat intelligence with the federal government, is due to sunset.
While renewal legislation, dubbed the Widespread Information Management for the Welfare of Infrastructure and Government Act, sailed out of committee last week, it has not gone to the full chamber yet.
Meanwhile, Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Rand Paul (R-KY) has only just begun to circulate his draft of a reauthorization bill, legislation that is considerably different from the House version, according to sources.
The Senate panel is expected to take up the measure soon. However, with only a handful of legislative days left before the September 30 deadline, one way policymakers could give themselves more time would be to add language to any short-term government funding bill that would keep the initiative up and running for the length of the stopgap measure.
“We have such strong partnerships with companies today,” according to Andersen. “Information sharing is going to persist no matter what, within the bounds of whatever legal construct that we have. But again, at the end of the day, we’re confident that Congress is going to work with us on putting together the best framework possible to be able to exchange information.”
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Martin Matishak
is the senior cybersecurity reporter for The Record. Prior to joining Recorded Future News in 2021, he spent more than five years at Politico, where he covered digital and national security developments across Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community. He previously was a reporter at The Hill, National Journal Group and Inside Washington Publishers.
