Digital Security Bills Bruised by Antipiracy Fight

Excerpt from an article in The New York Times
Thursday, February 09, 2012

Digital Security Bills Bruised by a Lingering Antipiracy Fight 

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

The ghosts of two doomed antipiracy bills hang over a new and unrelated issue on Capitol Hill: proposed legislation to help secure the nation’s nuclear plants, water systems and other essential infrastructure from hackers and terrorists.

In both houses of Congress, legislation is gaining steam that would authorize the federal government to regulate the security of privately owned critical infrastructure, much of which is controlled by Internet-connected systems and susceptible to being hacked. The legislation is already riven by competing interests and fears.

National security interests want the government to be able to collect and analyze information from private companies about how they protect themselves from attack. Those companies are skittish about government regulation generally. Civil liberties advocates warn against excessive information-gathering by the state in the name of computer security.

And members of Congress are wary of taking any steps that could infuriate the Internet lobby, which scored a surprise victory against would-be antipiracy laws last month.

Representative Dan Lungren, Republican of California, who recently introduced a computer security bill, acknowledged that Capitol Hill had learned some lessons about the new political muscle of technology companies and their users.

“One of the things we learned is that we have to raise the debate such that no one believes things are being done behind closed doors,” Mr. Lungren said in a phone interview.

A Congressional aide who did not want to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, put the lessons of the antipiracy efforts more bluntly. Some members, the aide said, “were kind of scarred by that experience and don’t want to go down any road where they are viewed as regulating the Internet.”