Cybersecurity, transportation policy and more discussed at Providence Chamber event

WARWICK, R.I. — Along with apple pancakes, sausage and fruit cups, some 500 Rhode Island business leaders got helpings of cybersecurity, transportation policy and patent control at the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce’s annual Congressional breakfast Monday morning.
Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse and Representatives James Langevin and David Cicilline fielded questions from Chamber president Laurie White and several preselected members of the audience.
Barbara Cottam, executive vice president of Citizens Financial Group, asked the legislators about the prospects of a bill dealing with cybersecurity and consumer protections being passed soon.
“There’s no perfect solution to cybersecurity,” Langevin told the crowd. “We will never solve cybersecurity.”
But, he continued, leaders in Congress are moving toward a bill that would require companies to notify consumers if their information had been compromised during a data breach.
“We need to do that as soon as possible,” he said, adding that it seemed that a limit of 30 days from the breach was becoming the consensus.
“The average American is blissfully ignorant of the threat cyber presents,” Whitehouse said. “This is really a big deal.”
He called digital industrial espionage the “biggest illicit transfer of wealth in human history.”
Langevin put numbers to the threat: $400 billion a year world wide, including money lost through hacking bank and credit card accounts. Of that $400 billion, $100 billion affects U.S. companies and citizens.
Cicilline underscored the business concerns that weigh on legislators as they consider cybersecurity legislation: how much should Congress require businesses do to prevent data breaches and how severe should the penalties be in the case of a breach.
In response to an audience question about T.F. Green Airport, Reed said leaders had to look beyond projects such as extending the Green’s main runway, a project already underway and expected to finish in 2017, to find ways to make Rhode Island’s main airport more competitive. As an example, with the longer runway, which allows planes to take off laden with more fuel to reach farther destinations, Green could become a gateway to America for European travelers if Amtrak added stops at the airport train station.
“We have to not sit back and say, ‘They’ll come.’ We have to go out and get them,” Reed said.
On patents, the Congressional delegation addressed the growing abuse of “demand” letter abuse, in which someone falsely claims a business has infringed on that person’s patent. Although such demands can be obviously false, many businesses will pay to license the patented technology, rather than pursue costly litigation.
Whitehouse said legislators generally agree such letters should be stopped, perhaps by making false demand letters an unfair trade practice. But the danger is that, once patent reform is opened, a wide range of parties want to add their interests to the legislation, increasing the chances of the bill stalling.

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