As a part of the State of the Union address tonight, President Obama called on Congress to provide more tools to enhance cybersecurity in the U.S. and expand the government’s ability to go after people for things like selling credit card numbers and selling access to botnets.
“…I urge this Congress to finally pass the legislation we need to better meet the evolving threat of cyber-attacks, combat identity theft, and protect our children’s information,” he said. “That should be a bipartisan effort. If we don’t act, we’ll leave our nation and our economy vulnerable. If we do, we can continue to protect the technologies that have unleashed untold opportunities for people around the globe.”
His statement alludes to a cybersecurity plan the White House unveiled earlier this month, which includes support for new legislation that will provide a variety of new tools for law enforcement, like giving courts the ability to shut down botnets, and giving the federal government the ability to curtail the sale of spyware “used to stalk or commit ID theft.” In addition, his proposal calls for increased information sharing about cybersecurity threats between the private sector and the U.S. government, and a national standard that requires companies to disclose data breaches.
President Obama’s framework has drawn a skeptical response from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“While the Administration information sharing proposal may have better privacy protections than dangerously drafted bills like CISPA, we think the initial case for expanding information sharing requires much less secrecy about how intelligence and law enforcement agencies collect and use data on our networks,” the group said in a statement following the proposal’s introduction last week. “And instead of increasing penalties under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, we’ve long advocated common sense reform to decrease them.”
The president’s comments are hardly surprising, given the recent attack on Sony Pictures. The attack, which the administration has blamed on North Korea, saw the company’s internal information strewn across the internet and not-yet-released movies released on pirate sites. The fallout from that attack, which included threats towards theaters that planned to show “The Interview,” led the company to release the film widely on a variety of online services.
Those weren’t the only tech-related comments the President made – he also reiterated his support for an open internet, as well as building out more network infrastructure to boost future innovations. The administration has also been making extensive use of technology as a part of the speech’s delivery: the whole address was broadcast on YouTube, and the text of the president’s speech was made available on Medium a few minutes prior to his spoken remarks.