Date: 2013-04-18
Speaker: JACKSON LEE (democrat)
Chamber: H

Again. I say that the cloud is saving consumers and businesses from the loss of valuable data. The Jackson Lee amendment adds to the firewall of protecting Americans privacy and. in the flow and the discourse of business. of protecting the privacy of our businesses that do not have data that is necessary for the governments information. That should be said over and over again. I thank both the ranking member and the chairman for their kind remarks. and I ask my colleagues to support the Jackson Lee amendment that provides. again. the firewall of privacy. With that. Mr. Chairman. I ask support of my amendment. and I yield back the balance of my time. Mr. Chairman. I want to thank Chairman ROGERS and Ranking Member RUPPERSBERGER for the work in crafting this legislation and the Rules Committee for making my amendment in order. Mr. Chairman. my amendment is straightforward. It improves the bill by providing that: Nothing in this Act or the amendments made by this Act shall be construed to provide authority to a department or agency of the Federal Government to require a cybersecurity provider that has contracted with the Federal Government to provide information services to provide information about cybersecurity incidents that do not pose a threat to the Federal Governments information. Mr. Chairman. the Jackson Lee amendment makes clear that the only instance in which a cloud service provider can share information about a cyber incident with a government agency is when the objective of an attempted intrusion of the service providers network was to gain unauthorized access to the governments information. Mr. Chairman. I am pleased to state that this commonsense amendment is supported by interested groups across the spectrum. from the ACLU on the left to the Constitutional Alliance on the right. In other words. if a cyber incident does not threaten the governments information. then the incident is none of the governments business. And this is especially true where disclosure to the government would compromise individuals privacy and proprietary information of businesses. Mr. Chairman. today something commonly called "the Cloud" plays an unseen but critical part in the lives of millions of Americans and thousands of businesses. Persons and businesses who use iPhones or use Gmail. Yahoo and MSN email services are connected to the Cloud. Cloud services include popular online services like Facebook. YouTube. "Linkedln" (a professional networking service) and "Flickr" (a place where millions of personal and family photos are stored). The Cloud is saving consumers and businesses from the loss of valuable data through storage services like the popular Apple iCloud. The Cloud protects digital information from loss should their computer or smart phone be damaged. lost or stolen. The Cloud also allows users seamless access to information from any location in the United States where internet access is available. Mr. Chairman. "cloud computing" is such an important innovation that it is changing how people. businesses. and government agencies manage information. The Jackson Lee amendment recognizes the importance of "cloud computing" to our economy and is consistent with the objectives of the bill while assuring that privacy and civil liberty rights of citizens are protected. This is an important amendment. and I urge my colleagues to support it.