Cybersecurity Policy Report, Draft Bill Seeks Diversity, Security in Government Technology, (Apr 8, 2024)
Draft legislation that seeks to “break the anti-competitive lock-in effect caused by proprietary, walled-garden software” and require encryption in the federal government’s communications systems has been introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden, the senator’s office announced today.
Sen. Wyden said the legislation would attempt to address the cybersecurity failures by Microsoft Corp. that were recently probed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board (CPR, April 3).
“My bill will secure the U.S. government’s communications from foreign hackers, while protecting taxpayer wallets. Vendor lock-in, bundling, and other anticompetitive practices result in the government spending vast sums of money on insecure software,” Sen. Wyden said. “It’s time to break the chokehold of big tech companies like Microsoft on government software, set high cybersecurity standards and reap the many benefits of a competitive market.”
The draft Secure and Interoperable Government Collaboration Technology Act would direct the General Services Administration “to create a list of collaboration technology features used by the federal government, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to identify a set of interoperable standards, requirements, and guidance for each of these collaboration technology features,” according to a summary of the draft bill.
Four years after NIST publishes the standards, the draft bill would require any “collaboration technology purchased by the federal government to be capable of communicating using the identified standards, so that it’s interoperable with other products used within the government,” the summary says.
The legislation also would require that, “to the fullest extent possible, the standards use end-to-end encryption and other technologies to protect U.S. government communications from foreign surveillance,” it says.
“Collaboration technology includes tools for text-based messaging, voice and video calling, and live document editing like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Google Docs,” the summary explains.
“Phone networks don’t require their customers to use the same network just to make a call. Not so with internet-based collaboration technologies: if one user is on Teams and the other on Zoom, there’s no way for the two products to talk to each other. For the Federal government, where dozens of agencies use different collaboration technologies, this lack of interoperability hurts the efficiency of collaboration processes, from video calling to scheduling,” it says.
The draft legislation is endorsed by Accountable Tech, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, Proton A.G., Nym Technologies S.A., and the Matrix.org Foundation, according to the senator’s office. Sen. Wyden is accepting feedback on the draft legislation at [email protected].
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