Defend COVID Research from Hackers Act<\/a>\u00a0would allow the president to impose sanctions on foreign individuals engaging in hacking activity that compromises economic and national security or public health and freeze any American assets of these individuals.<\/p>\nThe bill also requires the secretary of State, in consultation with the director of national intelligence, to submit a report to Congress within 180 days of the bill\u2019s passage on \u201cthe extent of known cyber-enabled activities or attempted cyber-enabled activities\u201d around COVID-19.<\/p>\n
McCarthy said in a statement that Congress should take steps to protect American researchers working on a \u201cVictory Vaccine\u201d to combat COVID-19, vowing that the U.S. would share any vaccine it developed with the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have seen that other nations \u2013 like China \u2013 use this virus to exploit other countries for political advantages,\u201d McCarthy said. \u201cWe refuse to allow our innovation to be exploited by China, Russia, or any other hackers. We are going to protect the cure from falling into the wrong hands so that no one can use it as leverage for their own malicious ends.\u201d<\/p>\n
He emphasized that \u201cthe stakes are too high for these significant cyber crimes to go unpunished. My legislation will hold these criminals accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rep.\u00a0Mark Green\u00a0(R-Tenn.) proposed the addition of the bill to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Tuesday before the House was scheduled to vote on the overall legislation, arguing that foreign efforts to target COVID-19 research, particularly from Chinese actors, should not go unpunished.<\/p>\n
\u201cAmericans are dying, China is hacking and we in Congress must act,\u201d Green said. \u201cHacking American intellectual property will not be tolerated, especially when it jeopardizes the lives of Americans. If we can\u2019t agree on punishing those who hack the heroes fighting for a cure for COVID, I don\u2019t know what we can agree on.\u201d<\/p>\n
This attempt failed, with the House voting the bill down by a vote of 219-201, mostly along party lines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27025"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27026,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27025\/revisions\/27026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}