Bryan Thompson and Sean B. Hoar of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP provide a status on action – and much inaction on bills at the federal and state level:
Congress has moved at a glacial pace in considering data security legislation this year, even as the fallout over major data breaches, including the OPM breach, turned up the heat on both the public and private sectors to protect sensitive data. At least twelve different data security-related bills have been proposed in the House and Senate, yet the majority are stalled in committee.
The Data Security and Breach Notification Act (H.R. 1770), for instance, is one of the most high-profile data breach notification bills in the 114th Congress and has advanced further than most other bills, having been marked up and amended by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on March 24. Yet no action has been taken on H.R. 1770 since then.
Cyber sharing legislation fared somewhat better, with the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (H.R. 1560) passing the House on April 22. The Senate has not yet taken up H.R. 1560, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) promised to move forward with the Senate’s companion bill to H.R. 1560 – the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA) (S. 754) – after a failed attempt to pass CISA in June.
Read more on Privacy & Security Law Blog.