April 21, 2016–The House encryption working group formed earlier this year (TRDaily, March 21) to examine legal and policy issues surrounding encryption technologies today laid out a “road map” for its activities for the rest of this year and said it hopes to wrap up its work by January 2017.   Its final work product, the group said today, will take the form of recommendations to the House.

Between now and then, the working group’s members and staff will hold meetings with “federal, state, and local government entities, former government officials, private industry and trade associations, civil society organizations, consultants and legal experts, academia, and cryptographers,” and will participate in “site visits” to hold meetings and receive technical briefings, it said. The working group also said it is looking for input from outside groups in the form of white papers, testimony or scholarly articles that should be submitted to EncryptionWG@mail.house.gov.

Members of the working group are Reps. Bill Johnson (R., Ohio), Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.), Yvette Clark (D., N.Y.), Joe Kennedy III (D., Mass.), Jim Sensenbrenner (R., Wisc.), Darrell Issa (D., Calif.), Zoe Lofgren (D., Calif.), and Suzan DelBene (D., Wash.).  Servicing as ex officio members are House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.); the committee’s ranking member, John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.); House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R., Mich.); and committee ranking member Frank Pallone Jr. (D., N.J.).  – John Curran, john.curran@wolterskluwer.com

Courtesy TRDaily

Senate Democrats today argued that the Supreme Court could find itself unable to act on key issues involving cellphone data and encryption if the Senate does not consider the nomination of appellate court judge Merrick Garland as the ninth justice.

“We need a Supreme Court operating at full strength so that our police, prosecutors, and law enforcement professionals have clear guidance to keep Americans safe and Americans have a strong shield for their civil rights and liberties,” Senate Democrats said in a news release. “With only eight justices, the Court could deadlock on critical issues relating to law enforcement and individual rights, creating uncertainty and even making it possible that people in different parts of the country have different rights and liberties. If a deadlock occurs, then an important, national issue would remain undecided until the Court was able to rehear that case or until another case raising the same issue came before it.”

Two of the issues that Democrats observed could come before the court involve whether law enforcement officers need a warrant to obtain historical information from cellphones and whether the government can compel companies to decrypt wireless devices. – Paul Kirby, paul.kirby@wolterskluwer.com

Courtesy TRDaily

A collection of tech-sector trade groups lowered the boom on a discussion draft of legislation released last week by Sens. Richard Burr (R., N.C.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), vice chairman of the committee, that would require communications service providers and communications device and software makers to comply with court orders for information or data in connection with the investigation of specified “serious crimes.”

In an April 19 letter to the senators, the trade groups said they had “deep concerns about well-intentioned but ultimately unworkable policies around encryption that would weaken the very defenses we need to protect us from people who want to cause economic and physical harm. We believe it is critical to the safety of the nation’s, and the world’s, information technology infrastructure for us all to avoid actions that will create government-mandated security vulnerabilities in our encryption systems.” Continue reading →

April 20, 2016–Fourteen “non-federal entities” are participating in the new cyber threat information-sharing network established in March by the Department of Homeland Security, and 82 others are preparing to join, a top DHS cybersecurity official told a House subcommittee today. “We will grow the system incrementally,” Andy Ozment, DHS’s assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications, told the Oversight and Government Reform’s information technology subcommittee.

 “We are not going to reach all of the American economy in just a few months.  I’m very happy with our rate of growth,” Mr. Ozment testified.  “It does require the participant to build some IT infrastructure on their end.”

DHS’s Automated Indicator Sharing (AIS) portal went live in mid-March, Mr. Ozment said.  The portal was authorized by the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, which was enacted late last year.  The AIS initiative is designed to enable the timely exchange of cyber threat indicators among the federal government, the private sector, and non-federal entities. “We have shared over 2,000 indicators with the private sector, and we have received additional indicators that the private sector did not allow us to share onward to other companies but that we did share internally within the federal government,” Mr. Ozment told the subcommittee. Continue reading →