Both The Hill and Washington Times expressed similar views of the new Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, without expressing them the same way. Andrea Castillo in the Times has the most interesting view on this, describing the CISA as something only a politician could love. [http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/9/andrea-castillo-cisa-a-cybersecurity-bill-only-a-p/ ] As a note: This website is almost impossible to read, being filled with ads and internal references, so email yourself the article before attempting to read it.
The real forces at work here are the IT Industry and Special Interest groups like some of us who would actually like to see government do something more aligned with security of computer systems. The IT Industry is on the other side of this, and for a good reason. If we actually can get something passed and people start reporting things they find when they are hacked, you can be sure they will find more zero day exploits that were designed in, fielded without proper testing, and ignored even after someone told those responsible that it needed to be fixed. The IT Industry thinks this can get them into trouble and has fought tooth and nail to water down any provisions of any bill that Congress tries to enact. They are deathly afraid that any bill to share information will result in work for their developers. They are right about that.
I don't necessarily believe that it is the Microsoft-Cisco cooperation in fighting this legislation means they are leading it. There are thousands of software developers, integrators, and cloud services who don't want to be seen as fighting something they know their customers would see as counter to what they are promising in the way of security. They are two-faced about it. They would like to see a couple of big companies represent them and stay out of the limelight. Actually, there isn't a whole lot of limelight on this anyway, since the legislation was around when I was on the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Committee - that was 10 years ago. They have managed to slow-roll this and will continue to poke and prode their elected representatives to make this bill suit their own needs. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was right out front the last time this issue came up, and we have yet to see much public comment by them this time around. They have gone underground with a lot of the others.
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