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Sharing classified information with nonfederal actors has benefits that extend well beyond protecting elections and improving cybersecurity.
Real-world success stories showing the benefits of cybersecurity information sharing can help information sharing organizations demonstrate their value to potential participant organizations and firms, to regulators and legislators and to the cybersecurity community.
Darren E. Tromblay has served the U.S. Intelligence Community, as an Intelligence Analyst, for more than a decade. He is the author of Political Influence Operations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and the forthcoming Spying: Assessing US Domestic Intelligence Since 9/11 (Lynne Rienner) as well as the co-author of Securing U.S. Innovation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
[Update: A knowledgeable contact confirms my sense that NSPM-7 should be viewed in continuity with long-standing efforts within the IC to develop technical architectures for sharing identity-specific information about suspected security threats. Those efforts trace back to, among other things, the 2008 issuance of NSPD-59/HSPD-24, which dealt with biometrics relating to terrorism-related threats. As noted below, the idea with NSPM-7 is to extend a similar approach to other categories of national security threat.
What is worse than the Federal government having actionable confidential information that it doesn't share with state and local governments, even though that information could assist them? How about sharing that information only to turn around and find that someone has taken it and leaked it to the press? It is hard to imagine a better way to stop the flow of useful information from the Federal government.