February 2016

President Barack Obama is seeking a 35 percent hike in cybersecurity funding in his final budget to boost the capability of the federal government to defend itself against cyberattacks. The proposed $19 billion request, which represents one of the largest increases ever sought in this area, comes as Congress and the public have witnessed an alarming series of intrusions in recent years against targets ranging from Target and Sony to the Pentagon and the Office of Personnel Management.

The proposal, announced Feb 9 with the President’s 2017 budget request, is part of a larger package of initiatives the White House is calling the cybersecurity national action plan. “[The plan] is intended to go after the underlying causes of our cybersecurity challenges, not at the symptoms,” said Michael Daniel, the White House cybersecurity coordinator. The money would go toward replacing aging — in some cases decades-old — computer systems with new machines and software, hiring additional skilled personnel, and increasing capabilities at the Pentagon’s Cyber Command and the FBI as well as in civilian agencies such as OPM and the Department of Veterans Affairs, officials said. Some portion of the money will go to the classified cyber budget for intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency and the CIA, they said. About $3.1 billion of the pot will go to modernizing computer systems and to hire a new federal chief information security officer to direct these changes across the government.

Congress spent at least $288 million on technology services in 2014, according to an analysis by the OpenGov Foundation. The group billed the analysis as one of the best publicly available tallies of tech spending from Congress, despite many of the roadblocks in tallying up bills based on sometimes vague disbursement forms.

The group said many aspects of congressional communications and staffing need to be updated to make use of better technology. House spending totaled at least $182 million that year, while Senate spending was at about $106 million. Many of the top recipients of House spending are not well-known names, including telecom and computer equipment companies and constituent correspondence firms like CDW Government Inc., Novitex and iConstituent LLC. Verizon and AT&T, better-known wireless providers, also ranked high on the list of top recipients. Verizon received more than $8 million from the House, while AT&T received about $6.5 million.

India’s landmark new open Internet policy, which was hailed by network neutrality advocates around the world on Feb 8, increases the pressure on American regulators to address a glaring loophole in US federal policy that allows telecommunications companies to sidestep rules designed to preserve the Internet’s open and freewheeling nature. Open Internet advocates argue that this practice, known as “zero-rating,” poses a serious threat to net neutrality—the principle that all content on the Internet should be equally accessible—because it allows telecom companies to favor certain online services by not counting those services against monthly data caps.

One year after the Federal Communications Commission approved the strongest open Internet protections in US history, zero-rating has emerged as the latest battlefront in the decade-long war over how best to regulate Internet service providers. India’s new policy, which bans zero-rating and the related practice of differential pricing, represents a dramatic defeat for Facebook. “The FCC should have just come out and banned zero-rating in the first place,” said Vishal Misra, a professor of computer science at Columbia University who helped lead the fight against zero-rating in India. “Now that the FCC has seen the world’s biggest democracy take this clear stand, it gives them cover to act, and I think they will. I think this will have a domino effect.”