ITAA President Harris Miller in a statement said the association approves of legislation for this purpose introduced in the Senate by Robert Bennett, R-Utah, and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., as well as by Reps. Tom Davis, R-Va., and James Moran, D-Va., in the House of Representatives.
The legislation, Miller said, "should be passed if Congress is serious about improving information sharing between government and industry on cyber-security vulnerabilities and countermeasures.
Bennetts and Kyls legislation, the Critical Infrastructure Information Security Act (CIISA), allows private companies to share information with 13 federal agencies without fear that the information would be disclosed to the general public through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
The senators had planned to introduce the bill in July, but postponed introduction in order to build support within the Senate Judiciary Committee.
It also contains an antitrust exemption that would allow companies to share this information without fear of being implicated in antitrust violations by the U.S. Justice Department.
Bennett stressed that the bill "does not alter FOIA in any way, and will protect voluntarily shared information without diminishing federal transparency by working within legally provided non-disclosure exemptions that protect information."
He added that "such information would not be in the public domain in the first place."
The information also would be used to catalog potential ways to combat infrastructure threats, details of which would be provided to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
"Companies have extremely sensitive information about network intrusions, computer viruses and other problems that, when shared, helps others harden their systems and improve their information security preparedness," the ITAA said in its statement. "Without adequate protections from inappropriate disclosure of information shared with the federal government, however, companies are concerned that such information sharing could lead to potentially damaging public release of confidential data."
Robert MacMillan, Newsbytes
