Nearly 200 senior IBM executives are flying into Washington to press for the passage of a controversial cybersecurity bill that will come up for a vote in the House this week.

The IBM executives will pound the pavement on Capitol Hill Monday and Tuesday, holding nearly 300 meetings with lawmakers and staff. Over the course of those two days, their mission is to convince lawmakers to back a bill that’s intended to make it easier for industry and government to share information about cyber threats with each other in real time.

[IBM VP of government affairs Chris] Padilla, however, says companies need to be able to share threat data directly with the NSA “because that’s where the expertise is.”

“It really is a simple matter. The expertise in the U.S. government on cybersecurity largely rests in one place, and that's the National Security Agency,” he said. “They tend to know the most, the soonest about cyber threats and I think, frankly, there is a certain amount of feeling in the business community that you should be able to work directly and share information directly with the agency that has the most expertise.”

March: Hackers allegedly steal the credit card numbers from 1.5 million Visa and MasterCard customers by breaking into the computer systems of the company's payment processor in New York. The thieves stockpiled the stolen credit card numbers for months before beginning to use them.

August: Cyber attackers disrupt production from Saudi Aramco, the world's largest exporter of crude oil, taking out 30,000 computers in the process, according to press reports.

January: PNC Bank announces to its 5 million customers that its website is getting hit with high traffic consistent of a cyber attack meant to delay business with its online banking customers.

These are just three reported examples of cyber attacks in the past 12 months. Each could have had a devastating impact on the U.S. and global economies. That's more than a bad dream — that's a full-blown nightmare.

Highly trained Chinese, Russian and Iranian hackers are probing, pilfering and plotting every second of every day. They're often after personal data: In November, reports suggested a hacker was able to access nearly 4 million tax returns in South Carolina with a single malicious email. And they're often after the trade secrets of our companies: The media has reported that Coca-Cola may have fallen victim to hackers from a Chinese beverage company.

Many believe that what is happening to American business may be the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. It's costing our companies billions of dollars, and it's costing our country thousands of jobs.

Preventing the U.S. government from sharing information about malicious computer code it detects is akin to preventing forecasters from warning citizens about a hurricane.

Our legislation doesn't just protect companies. It will also protect every American citizen who, for example, uses electricity or banks online, or whose doctor compiles medical records electronically.

It's important to note that under my legislation, your private information will also be kept private from the government. Information-sharing between companies and the government will be entirely voluntary. Businesses do not have to share information with the government in order to receive information from the government. The bill does not authorize the government to monitor your computer or read your email, Tweets or Facebook posts. Nor does it authorize the government to shut down websites or require companies to turn over personal information.

That decision is among several reached in recent months as the administration moves, in the next few weeks, to approve the nation's first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyberattack. New policies will also govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States and, if the president approves, attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code - even if there is no declared war.