Today the Senate failed to reach cloture on the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 by a margin of 52-46 of the necessary 60 votes, effectively killing the current iteration. The bill would have directed the Department of Homeland Security to conduct sector-by-sector cybersecurity risk assessments of critical infrastructure, identify risk-based cybersecurity performance requirements, implement cyber response and restoration plans, develop voluntary requirements for notifications and data-sharing in the event of significant cyber incidents affecting critical infrastructure.

President Obama previously called on Congress to pass the legislation, naming the cyber threat “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face”, despite having threatened to veto CISPA earlier this year due to privacy concerns similar to those raised by some opponents of the Cybersecurity Act of 2012.

Thethreat of cyber attack is very real. Public and private infrastructure around the world are vulnerable to attacks and the rate of incidents involving U.S. critical infrastructure have jumped from 9 in 2009 to 198 in 2011. But there are good reasons why this bill failed:

• The figures used to justify the bill don’t stand up to academic scrutiny. Backers of the legislation and bills like it relied on statistics quantifying the financial stakes of cybersecurity from private cybersecurity companies Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc. to justify immediate action, but ProPublica reports their numbers don’t add up.
• It lacked privacy safeguards: While not as hated by privacy advocates as previous cybersecurity proposals, if left un-amended the Cybersecurity Act would have given internet service providers the “explicit right to monitor private user communications.”
• The death of the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 isn’t the death of cybersecurity. Amendments made to this bill only put privacy advocates in a better position for the next round of debate. As Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel with ACLU, notes:

“When Congress inevitably picks up this issue again, the privacy amendments in this bill should remain the vanguard for any future bills. We’ll continue to work with Congress to make sure that the government’s cybersecurity efforts include privacy protections. Cybersecurity and our online privacy should not be a zero sum game.”

Richardson is right, and this much needed debate will be continued in the future. More details on todays vote via the New York Times.

Ahead of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first visit to South Sudan, which officially seceded from Sudan just last year, the Enough Project’s John Prendergast and author Dave Eggers write in the Washington Post that the United States, with partners in the international community, should increase humanitarian aid and support to the nascent pro-democracy there to prevent Sudan from deteriorating into another Syria:

Since South Sudan seceded, [Sudanese President Omar al-]Bashir’s regime has reignited the war in Darfur and is dropping bombs on restive populations in Blue Nile state and the Nuba Mountains. It is stoking potential war with South Sudan and is using excessive force against urban protesters; 2,000 people are now under arrest.

As Sudanese refugees pour into neighboring countries and new reports of thousands of unaccompanied minors — another generation of “lost boys” and “lost girls” — keep Sudan’s suffering on the radar, it’s time to ask what to do about the Bashir government.

Small Arab Spring-like protests began surfacing in Sudan in June which were set off by student objections to austerity measures imposed by the government. However, the movement quickly waned as security forces violently suppressed the movement. Just this week, a local activist group said Sudanese security forces killed 12 protesters demonstrating against high prices and yesterday, police used tear gas and batons to stop protests in Darfur’s biggest city Nyala against the government and its austerity program.

Prendergast and Eggers write that “it’s time for the United States and others to take a stand with those protesting and fighting — and dying — for democracy in Sudan”:

This support can take many forms, including rapid and substantial support to the Sudanese opposition and civil society, which are working assiduously for real democratic transformation. Washington and others should also work within and outside the U.N. Security Council to create a meaningful consequence for Khartoum’s aerial bombing and humanitarian aid blockade.

“If change can be achieved in Sudan, the country could become a catalyst for peace in the region,” they write, “rather than the engine of war and terror it has been for nearly a quarter-century.”

Mitt Romney’s recent visit to Jerusalem drummed up a few controversies: his top adviser upped the war rhetoric on Iran, Romney suggested Palestinian culture is “inferior to Israeli culture,” and he proclaimed Jerusalem as the capital of Israel — a designation no U.S. administration has made in more than six decades.

Now, a right-wing pressure group is out with an ad lauding Romney’s Jerusalem position. But the group appears to be getting “a little ahead” of Romney himself — as an aide put it when a top neoconservative adviser staked out an especially hawkish position on Iran. The group, the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), released an ad praising Romney for declaring that Jerusalem is the “capital of Israel.”

But in a press release accompanying the ad, ECI head Bill Kristol said Romney’s position on Jerusalem was even father to the right than anything the candidate has said:

Mitt Romney understands the meaning of Jerusalem, whole and free, the capital of Israel.

The division of Jerusalem is a key sticking point in the stalled peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians. While Israel annexed the whole city — a move the U.S. and international community don’t recognize — Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. Campaigning in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama dove into this territory by telling an audience that Jerusalem “must remain undivided,” but walked the statement back shortly thereafter.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, generally regarded as a hard-liner, has gone back and forth on the issue. He told PBS last year that, while he wanted Jerusalem to remain “united,” the city’s final status would only be decided “after a negotiation.” But earlier this year, Netanyahu said, “Jerusalem will remain forever the united capital of the State of Israel.”

Declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel, while breaking with long-standing U.S. policy, is one thing. But declaring that Jerusalem will not be divided — even if that could potentially kill any dimming hopes for a two-state solution — is quite another. As the vociferous Romney supporter and Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin has written in the past about merely moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem:

If we want to maintain our role as a future broker in the (however presently dormant) “peace process,” we’re not going to make a move that will be read as a fait accompli on the final status of Jerusalem.

Rubin is (was) right, and some intrepid campaign reporter should ask Mitt Romney if he agrees with Kristol’s characterization of his position and whether Jerusalem’s division is, as Netanyahu has claimed before, on the table for negotiations.

Since his 2008 run for the presidency, Mitt Romney has gotten his foreign policy advice from a gaggle of moderates and neoconservatives and other hawks. In this election cycle, the neoconservatives and other “Cheney-ites” reportedly marginalized moderates on the staff. One of the neocons — Dan Senor, who has been advising Romney since 2006 — seems to have stepped into the breech.

Despite a high profile, Senor came under a brighter spotlight in recent weeks for his role in two Romney campaign moves amid the GOP hopeful’s trip to Israel. Senor grabbed attention by, as one campaign official put it, getting “a little ahead” of Romney by backing an Israeli strike on Iran. Then Romney cited Senor’s book about Israeli entrepreneurship in his heavily criticized remarks that suggested economic disparities between Israelis and Palestinians could be chalked up to “culture.”

In a new report, the New York Times looked into Senor’s role on the Romney campaign and found that Senor is Romney’s “closest” foreign policy adviser and “has had his ear” since at least 2006:

His presence in the tight orbit of advisers around the Republican candidate foreshadows a Romney foreign policy that could take a harder line against Iran, embrace Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move away from being the honest broker in the conflict with Palestinians.

In light of the Times report, here’s a few items from Senor’s resume that may serve to preview what a Romney presidency may look like:

MENTORED BY BILL KRISTOL: “Beginning with Kristol, who is almost two decades his elder, Senor has flourished under the watch of a succession of father figures,” Tablet reported in a recent profile. Kristol, who led the charge into the Iraq war, has been so eager to bomb Iran that even George W. Bush mocked him as a “bomber boy.”

FLACKING FOR THE U.S. IN IRAQ: Remember those famous “rose-colored glasses” through which the Bush administration viewed the Iraq war — or, rather, used to present the Iraq war to the public? That was Senor, who flacked for the Coalition Provisional Authority through its disastrous reign over Iraq. Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote in his book on the CPA that Senor, who was just 31 when he joined up, did “a masterful job of spinning the media.” He reported that Senor once told reporters: “Well, off the record, Paris is burning. But on the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

WALL STREET HEDGE FUND: Since leaving government, Senor attended Harvard Business School and took up positions in prominent businesses, first at the defense giant the Carlyle Group, then at a Wall Street hedge fund. His boss at the hedge fund, Paul Singer, a “vulture capitalist,” is a major Romney backer who, while speculating on oil, funded a Karl Rove-led group that blamed President Obama for gas prices.

NEOCON PRESSURE GROUP: In 2009, Senor joined forces with Kristol to form the Foreign Policy Initiative, modeling it on the group that spearheaded the campaign for war with Iraq. Most recently, FPI called for direct U.S. military intervention in Syria. (Senor did not sign on, but fellow Romney advisers Robert Kagan, Eric Edelman, Stephen Rademaker, and Max Boot did.)

Now, as the Times reports today, Senor is Romney’s top foreign policy adviser, where he leverages his business ties into “success at hitting such people up for campaign cash.” Romney’s emerging hawkishness and critiques of Obama’s policies sound like they could have come straight from Senor — as they did in his comments about “culture.” The profile in Tablet ran down Senor’s myriad connections to the Israeli right — he even volunteered for the 1993 campaign of hard-liner Benny Begin, who opposes a two-state solution to the israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Senor and his ideological comrades hold as much sway over a Romney presidency as they do over his campaign, the situation in the Middle East could be explosive. Maybe that’s why this “policy” adviser is more often lauded for his flacking and fund-raising.

Our guest blogger is Nicolette Boehland, currently a fellow with CIVIC in Libya, previously researched the use of weapons in Libya with Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic.

Nine months after the official end of the civil war, Libyans are living under serious threat from abandoned weapons, ranging from bullets and mortars to torpedoes and surface-to-air missiles.

During the time I’ve spent as a researcher in Libya, I have been struck by the ubiquitous presence of weapons. I’ve seen ammunition spilling out of bombed bunkers that are inadequately secured, the wall of a school left in rubble after the explosion of a stockpile of weapons nearby, and countless bullet casings left on sidewalks.

But I’ve been most affected by the stories of ordinary Libyans who have suffered as a result of these abandoned weapons — Libyans like Mustafa, a 22-year-old scrap metal collector. Mustafa was harvesting weapons with his brother, hitting a Grad rocket to disassemble it to get valuable parts out, when the warhead went off.

“His body was in pieces,” a bystander, Abduladim Amar, told our colleague at Human Rights Watch.

This tragic story is one of too many contained in a report I helped research and write as a member of a four-person team from the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School. Explosive Situation: Qaddafi’s Abandoned Weapons and the Threat to Libya’s Civilians was released today in partnership with the Campaign for Innocent Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) and the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at the Center for American Progress (CAP).

We document in the report the ways that abandoned weapons threaten civilian lives in Libya. Children have been killed or injured while playing with weapons. Civilians of all ages continue to face dangers from the harvesting of weapons materials for sale or personal use. Clearance is being undertaken by untrained community members. People are displaying munitions as mementos of the revolution, in museums and in homes. In addition, Libyan militias have stockpiled weapons in an unsafe manner in populated areas, where an explosion could have catastrophic consequences.

Although these risks are severe, they can be significantly mitigated through proper stockpile management, clearance of munitions, risk education, and victim assistance programs. In our report, we call on the Libyan government to take the lead in creating a coordinated and comprehensive strategy for dealing with the problem — which is their duty under principles of international law. Meanwhile, the U.N., donor states and NGOs should provide ongoing and increased assistance for work related to abandoned ordnance.

Libya took another step toward stability in July with successful elections. But failure to address the problem of abandoned weapons could quickly destabilize the population. According to Doctor Ali Younis, head of the Medical Service Office in Sirte Hospital, the stakes are high: “If we keep the weapons, we lose our future.”