At the beginning of the month, a US Congressional subcommittee looking into the PlayStation Network outage and data leak asked Sony Computer Entertainment America chairman and Sony Corp. executive vice president Kaz Hirai to testify. The hope was that his testimony would answer questions about the three-week PSN downtime and the data breach that compromised 77 million users' personal information.

A Sony executive will testify before congress next week.

Tokyo-based Hirai didn't make the trip to Congress but did provide a detailed list of answers to the subcommittee's questions. Now, the Atlantic reports that Sony will indeed send a high-level executive to testify before the US House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade. Ken Johnson, an aide to subcommittee chairwoman Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), told the magazine that Tim Schaff, president of Sony Network Entertainment, would testify before the subcommittee next week.

"While Chairman Bono Mack remains critical of Sony's initial handling of the data breaches, she also is appreciative that the company has now agreed to testify," said Johnson. "The Chairman firmly believes that the lessons learned from…the Sony…experiences can be instructive and guide us as we develop comprehensive data protection legislation. We expect to introduce that legislation, which will provide new safeguards for American consumers, in the next few weeks."