dozens of breach notifications a month. Earlier this month, a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a bill, called the Data Accountability and Trust Act, that would require companies to notify affected consumers of breaches when there’s a "significant risk" of ID theft. The DATA bill would have to be approved by the full committee before going to a vote on the House floor.
A broader notification standard would drive up costs for businesses and inundate consumers with meaningless warnings, said Representative Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection. "This bill sets strong national standards, provides for increased oversight of information brokers, and creates a workable data security and breach notification regime that provides incentives for technological solutions to security issues that will benefit consumers and the nation’s commercial infrastructure alike," Stearns said in a statement.
Some Democrats on the subcommittee criticized the "significant risk" standard in the bill. Concerns about over-notification are "disingenuous," said Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat.
"The right response to over-notification is not to restrict information and to keep consumers and Congress in the dark," she said during a Nov. 3 hearing. "If we want to stop over-notification, then corporations need to clean up their act so consumers’ personal information is not compromised in the first place."
CDT also has questioned a reporting exception in some of the congressional bills for encrypted data. Groups such as the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) have called on Congress to encourage the use of encryption by giving a breach notification exemption to companies that use encryption.
The CDT doesn’t object to an encryption exception, but there should be limits, said David Sohn, CDT staff counsel. A company with a data breach shouldn’t be able to avoid reporting it if they use weak encryption, he said. And in cases when the encryption key is stolen along with the data -- such as data theft by a company insider -- companies should be required to notify consumers, he added.
But the House subcommittee bill approved Nov. 3 defines encryption as technology approved by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, said Warren Smith, vice president of marketing for GuardianEdge Technologies Inc., a vendor of encryption technology for mobile devices. The NIST standard is 256-bit encryption, Smith said.
"Breaking that key is considered commercially infeasible," Smith said. "We believe encryption is the fundamental technology