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House Overwhelmingly Passes Cybersecurity Bill
eldavojohn writes "The Caucus, a NY Times Blog, is reporting on the overwhelming majority vote (422 yeas) the House gave a new cybersecurity bill. The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act, H.R. 4061 has a number of interesting provisions. Representative Michael Arcuri, a Democrat of New York who sponsored the bill called cybersecurity the 'Manhattan Project of our generation' and estimated the US needs 500 to 1,000 more 'cyber warriors' every year in order to keep up with potential enemies. The new bill 'authorizes one single entity, the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to represent the government in negotiations over international standards and orders the White House office of technology to convene a cybersecurity university-industry task force to guide the direction of future research.'"
The federal government hasn't done a particularly good job advertising their Scholarship for Service Federal Cyber Service program where promising cyber students are given scholarships in return for a promise to give the government 2 years of service as federal employees in a cyber security related position. Few in the IT field even know it exists. But it's an exceptional idea and most government agencies are lobbying for expanding it to bring in even more students. The federal government isn't entirely incompetent or bereft of good ideas or lacking the will to implement them. The SFS Cyber Service program is one of their success stories.
"He's using a quantum encryption scheme! That'll take hours to break!"
NIST isn't a new entity, they are the US Government's standards body, they are part of the Dept of Commerce, and write all kinds of standards the government has to use.
So when the government directs their standards body to take part in standards negotiations on their behalf, there is no conspiracy there.
Take a look at some of what NIST does
http://www.nist.gov/index.html
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/orgchart.htm
Also note that like IEEE all of their Technology Special Publications go through public comment periods.
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsSPs.html
One of my favorites is SCAP, its like an XML for Security products that helps to standardize vulnerability reports and security settings so you can check using an array of SCAP compatible tools if your thousands of machines are all patched and up to date as well as running your enterprise security config.
http://scap.nist.gov/
I'd be concerned if some new bill made someone ELSE without some of the worlds best test labs, scientists and engineers negotiate standards for the US.