Mr. REED. Mr. President, I wish to comment briefly on the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act that the Senate is considering. Let me first commend the sponsors, Senator Burr and Senator Feinstein, for their extraordinary work.

    This bill will help ensure greater sharing of cyber threat information, more rapidly and broadly, across industry and government. As we have seen with large-scale attacks against the Federal Government and companies such as Sony, there is an urgent need to start addressing these breaches. While such legislation is not going to eliminate our cyber security challenges, it should materially help to defeat and deter cyber attacks and assist law enforcement in tracking down and prosecuting cyber criminals. Information sharing will also assist the intelligence agencies and law enforcement to detect and trace the attacks originating from foreign actors, which is a crucial step in holding other countries accountable.

    Many of our citizens and corporations are understandably concerned about the impact of information sharing on privacy. But we also must recognize that rampant cyber crime is a monumental threat to the privacy of the American people, and that sharing information about these criminal acts cannot only protect privacy but also protect our public safety and national security.

    With respect to the specific privacy protections in the legislation before us, the managers of this bill have come a long way toward improving the balance between security and privacy protection, especially the changes made to the base bill by the managers' substitute.

    A major area of concern was whether the government should be authorized to use information shared under this bill to investigate or prosecute a host of crimes unrelated to cyber security. Now the bill is more narrowly tailored and focused on using information gathered under this bill to go after crimes that are specifically related to cyber security.

    The managers' substitute also adds a requirement that the information sharing procedures, required to be issued under this bill, include a duty to notify individuals when the Federal Government shares their personally identifiable information, or PII, erroneously.

    The managers' substitute also includes an improved reporting requirement that will show the number of notices sent because the government improperly shared an individual's PII and the number of cyber threat indicators shared automatically and, in addition, the number of times these indicators were used to prosecute crimes.

    So the managers' substitute has come a long way toward being more protective of individual privacy, and I would like, once again, to recognize Senators FEINSTEIN and BURR's hard work here and their willingness to listen to their colleagues. While I might personally have set the balance slightly different in some places, which is why I have supported some of the amendments before us, I think they have done a significant job in improving the bill and providing privacy protection.

    I do want to draw my colleagues' attention to one important additional fact here, which in some cases has been largely overlooked. The cyber information sharing system established by this bill will require Federal dollars to implement. Many of the agencies involved--the Department of Homeland Security being the primary portal for shared threat indicators--are funded on the nondefense discretionary side of the ledger. This is an example of why I and many of my colleagues have been urging for sequester relief for both defense and nondefense spending--because we cannot defend our homeland without funding nondefense agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and a host of other key Federal agencies. Indeed, I am encouraged that we are close to voting on a budget solution that will provide 2 years of sequester relief on a proportionally equal basis for defense and nondefense spending, and that protects the full faith and credit of the United States by taking the threat of default off the table until March of 2017.

    For this reason, I look forward to final passage of this legislation. I once again commend the principal authors, Senator Burr and Senator Feinstein, for their extraordinary effort.

    I yield the floor.