Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) released the following statement regarding today’s successful cloture vote in the Senate on the Cybersecurity Act of 2012:
“Today’s vote is a key first step toward passing much needed cybersecurity legislation into law. This is one of the most important national security issues facing us today: we must take action to protect our nation from cyber attacks. I commend Senators Lieberman, Collins, Feinstein, and Rockefeller for their hard work, and for their willingness to make appropriate compromises in order to build bipartisan support for this important legislation. I look forward to continue working with them and others as the debate proceeds.”
Whitehouse chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Cyber Task Force in 2010 and has been active in the efforts to draft the legislation voted on today. In particular, he has worked with a bipartisan group of Senators, including Jon Kyl (R-AZ), to develop a compromise on how to ensure the protection of critical infrastructure – the electric grid, the servers that process our financial transactions, etc. The current version of the bill adopts significant elements of the compromise approach developed in this work.
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