Amitay in Action
For the past sixteen years, as Federal Legislative Counsel, and since 2012 as Executive Director and General Counsel, Mr. Amitay has represented the National Association of Security Companies (NASCO), the largest association of contract security companies in the United States. Over this time, Mr. Amitay has significantly raised NASCO’s and the industry’s political profile and level of involvement with Congress and Federal agencies, business associations, as well as with State legislators and regulators. At the Federal level, on behalf of NASCO, Mr. Amitay has testified numerous times before Congress, worked with congressional staff on legislation and agency oversight, worked with GAO on investigations, drafted comments on federal regulations, set up industry working groups with federal agencies, and participated in federal court and agency legal and litigation proceedings. At the State level, Mr. Amitay has initiated and coordinated lobbying efforts to successfully enact industry friendly laws, as well as to defeat bad legislation. He has established working relationships with industry state regulators and licensing agencies, and he represents the industry on the Board of a state regulator/industry association. Mr. Amitay also writes op-eds and press releases and gives statements to the press on behalf of NASCO.
For a mid-sized company manufacturing radiation detection equipment, Mr. Amitay successfully worked with home state congressional offices, committees with oversight and spending authority and federal agencies that utilize radiation detection equipment, to generate understanding, interest, testing, and most importantly, federal agency procurement of the company’s detection equipment.
For a large U.S. copyright content owner, whose copyrighted works were being infringed by governmental entities in a foreign country, Mr. Amitay enlisted the support and worked with the intellectual property and trade-related committees in Congress, the United States Trade Representative, the State Department, and the Commerce Department to mount a diplomatic and trade effort that succeeded in not only persuading that country to stop its governmental infringement of his client’s works, but to pass a new law strengthening that country’s domestic protection for certain types of copyrighted material, thus preventing any further possible infringement of his client’s intellectual property.
For almost two decades, Mr. Amitay represented the world’s largest association of security professionals on a variety of issues before Congress and the Executive Branch. In one example of his efforts for this client, Mr. Amitay worked with congressional allies to get a post-9/11 business preparedness bill expanded so that a preparedness Standard developed by the client would be eligible to be included in a new DHS business preparedness program being created by the bill. Then, Mr. Amitay worked with Congress and DHS officials to get the Standard selected for the program. In another example, Mr. Amitay played a point role in a lobbying effort to pass federal legislation authorizing employers of private security officers to request FBI criminal history background checks on their officers. After the legislation was enacted, Mr. Amitay then worked with individual states to set up programs to conduct the security officer FBI background checks for employers authorized in the legislation.