Dive Brief:

• Congress may pass a cybersecurity measure aimed at prompting businesses to share information on online threats as early as today, the Wall Street Journal reports.
• The measure was inserted into the broad spending package Congress has been considering this week.
• The proposal removes legal barriers to companies cooperating more closely with the government and each other in fighting online threats.

Dive Insight:

Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the legislation would help provide the intelligence community with “the tools it needs to identify, disrupt and defeat threats to the homeland and our infrastructure.”

Lawmakers scrambled to reach an agreement on the measure this week in order to include it in the must-pass omnibus bill.

The bill encourages businesses to voluntarily share information with the federal government about cybersecurity attacks and other threats they come across. It also makes the Department of Homeland Security the primary portal for sharing the information.

But privacy advocates generally do not support the measure, saying it does not adequately protect people against inappropriate disclosure of personal data and that it would do little to address the issues that have led to recent high-profile data breaches.

Privacy protections went “from very bad to worst” in the bill, said Mark Jaycox, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.