The House's piecemeal approach to legislating cybersecurity won't cut it, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said today while taping an episode of C-SPAN's "The Communicators," which will air Saturday at 6:30 p.m. Schmidt said the president's advisers would still recommend he veto the information sharing legislation (HR 3523) passed by the House last week, even after a series of amendments designed to address concerns about how the government can use information handed over by private companies. Schmidt said CISPA still presents significant privacy issues and doesn't address critical infrastructure, which the administration has framed as crucial to any cybersecurity legislation that passes. Instead, Schmidt pushed the Senate's comprehensive package (S 2105), which would implement what he termed narrowly-focused regulations for core critical infrastructure providers.
Despite the House's resistance to anything that resembles new regulations, Schmidt was confident that bipartisan agreement could be reached on the issue. He also pointedly dismissed the House's piecemeal approach to cybersecurity, arguing the White House's cybersecurity proposal from a year ago lays out several areas that must be addressed in order to safeguard the nation's computer networks. Schmidt said the point has come where a cyber-attack could potentially cause catastrophic economic damage or significant loss of life, adding urgency to the push for new laws. When asked if the White House would prefer the House package or no legislation passing this year, Schmidt said he is confident it won't come to that.
Schmidt's comments are largely in line with the administration and Senate leadership, who have drawn a line in the sand over the issue of critical infrastructure. While it's not surprising to hear the White House remains opposed to the House's cybersecurity package, it does place the onus on the administration to either convince House leadership to compromise, or risk watching their best chance to date at passing cybersecurity legislation fade in the run-up to this fall's election. With industry firmly behind the GOP's proposals, the White House is betting heavily that the national security implications of the issue will force an eleventh-hour agreement. If they're wrong and the nation suffers a serious cyber attack in the interim, the Democrats could end up ceding another area of national security policy to the GOP for the foreseeable future.