Industry Cybersecurity Plea to President Obama

In today's Wall Street Journal, there is full-page open letter by the National Retail Federation (NRF) asking the President to consider these legislative intiatives:

Federal Fraud Protection for debit cards

Pin and chip cards for Americans, which they call the "least protected consumers in the world."

Point-to-point encryption through the entire payment chain

Open, competitive tokenization standards to replace personal data

A single National data breach notification law

Law Enforcement legislation that would aid in the investigation and prosecution of criminals

One would think that the middle class orientation of the politicians in Washington would have produced this kind of legislation at some point in the long, long reign of President Obama.  It hasn't even produced a bill to facilitate exchange of threat and vulnerability information, which we might note was not asked for in this "open letter".  I should also point out that the standards for credit and debit cards are largely not developed by the government through legislation.  They come from the industry itself.  These are the same folks who dragged their feet on the implementation of pin and chip cards and finally decided that 4-digit pins were too hard for their customers to remember.  Congress can pass all the legislation it wants, but the industry, including the NRF would be better served to start protecting their customers and stop blaming Congress and the White House for the retail industry's inability to lead.