Congress Pushes Bills To Promote Cybersecurity

Congress isn't doing much — with the major exception of cybersecurity. Citing rare bipartisan agreement and a common sense of purpose, members of both parties are advancing bills designed to protect American businesses and government agencies from hackers and intellectual property pirates. The proposed laws allow the government to block Americans' access to certain overseas websites, as well as make it legal for Internet service providers to share with the government information about emails and other traffic traveling their networks, in the interest of detecting and stopping cyberattacks. Sponsors of the bills say they're necessary to protect the U.S. from hacker disaster. But skeptics say the fears are overblown, and the legislation could take the U.S. closer to having its own version of the Great Firewall of China.