Last week was a busy one for data protection bills for the end of the 109th U.S. Congress. Prior to adjourning, they introduced at least six bills related to data protection.
In the Senate…
* December 6: S. 4089 introduced by John McCain, “A bill to modernize and expand the reporting requirements relating to child pornography, to expand cooperation in combating child pornography, to require convicted sex offenders to register online identifiers, and for other purposes.” According to various published reports, basically it would require all registered sex offenders to submit their active e-mail addresses to law enforcement. The legislation would allow online companies, including social networking Web sites, to cross-check new members against a database of registered sex offenders to ensure that predators are unable to sign up for the service. Any sex offender who submits a fraudulent e-mail could face jail time under the legislation.
* December 7: S. 4100 introduced by George V. Voinovich, “A bill to expand visa waiver program to countries on a probationary basis and for other purposes.”
* December 7: S. 4110 introduced by Gordon H. Smith, “A bill to enhance Federal Trade Commission enforcement against illegal spam, spyware, and cross-border fraud and deception, and for other purposes.”
In the House…
* December 5: H.R. 6371 introduced by Jerrold Nadler, `Patients’ Privacy Protection Act of 2005;’ “To amend the Federal Rules of Evidence to create an explicit privilege to preserve medical privacy.”
* December 6: H.R. 6388 introduced by Louie Grohmert, “To direct the Secretary of Defense to conduct a study on the feasibility of using military identification numbers instead of social security numbers to identify members of the Armed Forces.”
* December 7: H.R. 6416 introduced by Patrick T. McHenry, “To amend the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to exempt certain financial institutions from the internal control assessment requirement under such Act.”
Many of these are intriguing by the fact the actual text of the bills are not yet available, but the short descriptions certainly raise many questions about what really is being proposed once the fine print is reviewed. For example, trying to find out what H.R. 6416 would change about SOX, I checked Patrick T. McHenry’s web site but found no mention of the bill there.
So many bills are introduced, and so few actually ever get passed. However, it is good to keep an eye on them and see the trends in topics that the lawmakers are pursuing; often a bill eventually gets passed that is some version of a conglomeration of the related bills that were introduced prior to finally passing a bill.
The 110th Congress is scheduled to convene for the first time January 4, 2007.
Tags: awareness and training, data protection, government, Information Security, IT compliance, laws, policies and procedures, privacy