But in the days leading up to the State of the Union address, the Obama administration released a cybersecurity proposal, which will be sent to Congress, that speaks directly to the Sony incident. The key component of the proposal is, indeed, “integration.” Specifically, it affords private companies liability protection to share information with the Homeland Security Department’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center.

The chief of the NSA’s Tailored Access Division Robert Joyce, has described the Sony hack as a key moment that will fundamentally change the way the United States deals with the murky threat posed by shadowy enemies with laptops. It was, in popular if clichéd Washington, D.C., parlance, “a game changer.” Joyce was not alone in that assessment.

“We had seen cyber attacks but we’ve never seen a nation-state…destroy data,” former Michael Rogers, a Republican representative from Michigan, told a group at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., last week. It was that willful destruction of data, as opposed to simply theft, that elevated the Sony hack to an incident more urgent than any of the recent high-profile attacks that had affected major corporations, which were aimed primarily at the theft of data for narrow, mercantile purposes.

Rogers, a seven-term congressman, has indicated he would be leaving the House for greener (sounding) pastures in radio. But during his tenure, where he served as the head of the House Intelligence Committee, he earned a reputation as one the National Security Agency’s most stalwart allies at the agency’s moment of greatest shame.

The bill that perhaps best characterized that reputation, H.R. 3523, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, never actually became law, having stalled in the Senate after passing the House. It would have granted liability protections to corporations that would then be able to share that information with the government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security.

It was an idea that predates Rogers and CISPA—in 2008, the Bush White House put out National Security Presidential Directive – 54 that outlined the U.S. interest in information sharing in the name of cybersecurity. But it was Rogers who refined it and pushed to enshrine it in legislation.

CISPA would give companies the freedom to share user data with the DHS where the info could then go to virtually any other law enforcement agency for use in any investigation related to crimes from drug trafficking to copyright infringement. It sent a clear message to some of America’s biggest companies: “We need you to do our spying for us.”

Privacy advocates argued that the bill’s language was too broad. It would allow every company from Google to Apple to Facebook to share information on their users with the government outside of the parameters of the Electronics Communications Privacy Act as well as the Wiretap Act.