Quick Hits

*** The leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee are seeking a probe into the cybersecurity incident response capabilities of the Department of Health and Human Services. " The Chief Information Security Officer at HHS recently acknowledged that the ongoing COVID-19 public health crisis has placed a new target on HHS, and malicious actors have boosted their efforts to infiltrate the agency and access sensitive data," lawmakers wrote in a bipartisan Oct. 9 letter to the Government Accountability Office.

*** U.S. Attorney General William Barr joined in an international declaration seeking joint government-industry proposals to give law enforcement oversight of encrypted communications. Barr was joined by top law enforcement officials from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada – the Five Eyes nations that are joined by a cooperation treaty in signals intelligence. Japan and India joined in the statement.

"We urge industry to address our serious concerns where encryption is applied in a way that wholly precludes any legal access to content," the statement read. The officials are concerned that end-to-end encryption poses, "significant challenges to public safety, including to highly vulnerable members of our societies like sexually exploited children."