An infamous cybersecurity bill may be headed back to Congress in the new year. Representative Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD) has told The Hill that he will be reintroducing CISPA to the House on Friday, as a response to the growing cybersecurity challenges facing the nation. The bill has been put before Congress a number of times in the past, but coming on the heels of the Sony Pictures hack, Ruppersberger believes there will be new energy behind the legislation. "The reason I’m putting the bill in now is I want to keep the momentum going on what’s happening out there in the world," Rep. Ruppersberger, told The Hill. "We have to move forward."

The bill primarily serves to encourage information sharing between corporate networks and government agencies like the NSA. But while government officials have continued to stress the necessity of such measures, many web groups have seen them as a justification for spying on users and maintaining broader surveillance systems of the kind detailed by the Snowden leaks. When CISPA was first introduced in 2012, the Electronic Frontier Foundation strongly criticized the bill, saying, "we must do everything within our power to safeguard the privacy rights of individual Internet users and ensure that Congress does not sacrifice those rights in a rush to pass vaguely-worded cybersecurity bills."