Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., navigating his way through a tough re-election campaign, announced July 20 that he would retire at the end of his next six-year term if he wins in November.
Burr, who made the remarks at a breakfast meeting with the North Carolina delegation to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, is the first GOP chairman of the intelligence panel since Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas relinquished the gavel after the 2006 elections.
He also collected one trophy that eluded previous committee leaders, with passage of a major cybersecurity information-sharing and policy bill at the end of 2015.
In his first year as chairman, Burr formed a close partnership with Intelligence ranking member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and managed to craft a bipartisan cyberbill that cleared the committee and ultimately the full Senate.
The measure was folded into the year-end omnibus spending package and signed into law in December.
That was a quiet conclusion to five years of often bitter Senate debate over cyberlegislation.
Major cyberbills had consistently stalled in the Senate prior to passage of that bill, hung up over privacy and civil liberties issues, jurisdictional skirmishes and other legislative priorities.
But Burr and Feinstein, perhaps the Senate’s leading Democratic cyberhawk, managed to add enough privacy-protecting elements to assuage most — though not all — civil liberties advocates on both sides of the aisle, while preserving the core security features of the bill.
For instance, Burr agreed to place a limit on direct cybersecurity info-sharing between private entities and law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which had been a focus of criticism from privacy advocates.
Burr at the time made clear that he believed such direct sharing should be allowed, but that a compromise on the issue was necessary in order to move the bill.
Burr also led the effort last year to replace expiring provisions of the controversial USA Patriot Act with the USA Freedom Act. Passage of the Freedom Act in many ways prepared the ground, politically, for later passing the cybersecurity bill by putting new limits on government surveillance authorities.
That helped defuse some of the criticism that the cyberbill was in fact a “mass surveillance” bill, a charge that Burr consistently pushed back against throughout the year.
Burr and Feinstein’s partnership has continued into this year on other cyberissues, such as encryption.
However, their proposal to give law enforcement access to encrypted communications with a legal court order has yet to advance through committee amid a barrage of criticism from the tech industry and online privacy advocates.
Burr is completing his second term in the Senate after serving five terms in the House. He is expected to continue as the top Republican on the intelligence panel if he is re-elected.
However, he is locked in a close race for re-election with Democrat Deborah Ross.
The Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report says the race “leans” Republican, meaning Burr holds a slight edge. Likewise, the Cook Political Report has the North Carolina race as “leans Republican.”
Another Senate Republican with cybersecurity jurisdiction, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson, faces a stiff re-election challenge in Wisconsin from former Sen. Russell Feingold, a Democrat who has opposed cyberlegislation on privacy grounds.
The Johnson-Feingold race is rated as a tossup that “leans Democrat” by Rothenberg and as a pure tossup by Cook.
The North Carolina and Wisconsin races are viewed as critical to GOP efforts to hold the Senate. Democrats need a net pickup of five seats to win control of the Senate, or four if they hold onto the White House.
Charlie Mitchell is editor of InsideCybersecurity.com, an exclusive service covering cybersecurity policy from Inside Washington Publishers, and author of “Hacked: The Inside Story of America’s Struggle to Secure Cyberspace,” published by Rowman and Littlefield.
