With President Barack Obama highlighting the cyber security threat and information security in his State of the Union address to Congress Tuesday night, lawmakers seemed confident they could get a cyber bill through to the president’s desk this year despite last year’s finish-line failure.

The president received a bipartisan standing ovation when he said, “No foreign nation, no hacker, should be able to shut down our networks, steal our trade secrets, or invade the privacy of American families, especially our kids. We are making sure our government integrates intelligence to combat cyber threats, just as we have done to combat terrorism. And tonight, I urge this Congress to finally pass the legislation we need to better meet the evolving threat of cyber attacks, combat identity theft, and protect our children’s information. If we don’t act, we’ll leave our nation and our economy vulnerable.”

Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), co-chairman of the Cyber Security Caucus
Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), co-chairman of the Cyber Security Caucus

Cyber Security Caucus co-founder and co-chairman Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) told Defense Daily after the president’s address that “there’s a real critical mass, both in this Congress and among the American people in our efforts to pass cyber security legislation that will do a much better job at protecting the country. It’s long past due, we need to have it passed, and it’s going to be up to members of Congress for all of us to step up and actually do it this time.”

Last year, the House passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, and a comparable bill made it out of the Senate Intelligence Committee but never reached the Senate floor for a vote.

“I’m just glad that the president has highlighted the importance of cyber security once again in his State of the Union message,” Langevin said. “It’s not the first time he’s done it, he’s done it in other speeches and in other State of the Union addresses, but I was glad to hear him give it a fresh mention.”

House Appropriations Committee member Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said that “this is an area where I think we can work with the president, we should work with the president. I think we’ve had enough incidents recently that people are genuinely concerned, and frankly we have a Senate that now I think will take up the bills that we’ve passed.”

 “I think the risk here is obvious, the danger is great and this is something we ought to move on,” Cole continued. “I don’t think we’re ever going to get something like this completely right the first time, we just need to get a base bill in and put an authorization time on it, five years, but something we can come back and look at it repeatedly. There’s always going to be tension in this country between security and liberty–that’s a great thing, that’s why we keep our constitutional liberties. But I don’t think waiting around is very smart in a dangerous world.”

Langevin said he thought there was still a willingness to compromise on the bill, both within Congress and between lawmakers and the president.

“We’re already doing cyber briefings in the Cyber Security Caucus. I’m right now drafting data breach legislation as we speak, as well as other bills that I have introduced before and will continue to introduce again,” he said. “I was briefed by the White House about the cyber security bills that the president wants to have introduced here in the Congress, and I look forward to working with the administration on the information sharing bill and on the data breach notification legislation.”

Other areas of contention between Congress and the president seemed to bubble up after Obama’s address, however. Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), who was just named chairman of the Senate Appropriations homeland security subcommittee, said he thought his fellow lawmakers could work with Obama on cyber but that immigration reform could prove tricky. “The main thing I was looking for in his speech was for him to say he’ll work with Congress, and instead he’s issued about five veto threats. And he’s got to work with us. The path to immigration reform is to work with Congress, that’s what he needs to do.”

Congress is still working on a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the rest of the fiscal year. In December, lawmakers agreed on funding for all other federal departments but, in response to the president’s executive action on immigration reform, held off on updated funding levels for DHS until they could determine a path forward to counter the president’s actions. The House passed a funding bill and is waiting to see what the Senate will do.

Cole said there was bipartisan and bicameral agreement on the “basic funding” portion of the bill, but “it’s the amendments where the conflict is.” He said he was hopeful the lawmakers could reach an agreement–and the president would sign the bill into law–before DHS funding runs out at the end of February.

Given the range of current threats to the United States, “why in the world would you want to get the Border Patrol not working, or the FBI not working? That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”