Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The heads of the Bill have not been published yet. There is a reference, however, to whether we need to provide for some intelligence capacity in this regard and some legal underpinning to that. It is not possible to gather information without having some kind of legal basis to do that in the first place. The role of the NCSC is to disrupt attacks. I refer to a situation where a cyberattack may be under way and, in that context, determining what it might be possible to do to disable the attackers. That is the nature of cyber defence as opposed to cybersecurity. We can think of cybersecurity as the measures taken to prevent an attack from happening in the first place and cyberdefence then as what is done when an attack is under way and someone has been identified as an adversary or opponent.