Fight over cyber information-sharing bill revived at RSA

Congress will soon make an historic decision over whether a military or civilian agency should head up intelligence-sharing efforts about cyber threats, argued Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, during a panel at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco.

"In democratic society, do you want the military to have this center of gravity kind of control over what could potentially be very, very large flows of information about private to private communications?” Dempsey asked. "You can talk about creating a lot of checks and balances, [but] one of the fundamental checks and balances is you put that authority on the civilian side." Dempsey's comments come as Congress is weighing a controversial cybersecurity bill that aims to remove the legal barriers that hinder government agencies and private companies from sharing information about malicious source code and other cyber threats with one another in real time. Reps. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, re-introduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, known as CISPA, earlier this month.