President Obama has been on a recent tour ahead of today’s State of the Union address speaking about the importance of cybersecurity and what steps his Administration will take to protect individuals. The recent cyberattacks on some major retailer as well as issues with encryption protocols such as the Heartbleed bug for Internet communication protection in conjunction with the Sony Pictures and recently the Twitter and YouTube account of the US Central Command clearly shows the importance of this topic.

Even thought the US Central Command hack did not disclose any internal sensitive information, the hacking seems to have caused more embarrassment for the administration than anything else.

President Obama stated, “We are going to be introducing new legislation, a consumer privacy bills of rights”.  He also stated, “Working with the private sector and advocacy groups, we were able to identify some basic principles to both protect the personal privacy of individuals and ensure that industry can keep innovating”.

President Obama is also calling for new legislation that petition companies to inform customers of data breaches within 30 days as well as make it a crime if companies were to sell customer data overseas. The Administration is also looking to create a law that would prevent educational software companies from selling student data to third parties. President Obama stated, “Data collected on students in the class room should only be used on educational purposes, to teach our children, not to market to our children”.

While the President has a list of proposals he will address to the American people, privacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is not in agreement with many of the proposals. EFF stated on their website, “More needs to be done to protect cyberspace and enhance computer security. But President Obama’s cybersecurity legislative proposal recycles old ideas that should remain where they’ve been since May 2011”.  More information on EFF’s stance on President’s Obama’s can be located at “EFF Statement on President Obama’s Cybersecurity Legislative Proposal”.

What ever your position, this should bring some interesting debate.