Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I would like to speak in support of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. I had hoped Senator Burr, the chairman of the committee, would be able to deliver the remarks initially. However, he has been unfortunately delayed, and so I will go ahead with my remarks as vice chairman of the committee. There is no legislative or administrative step we can take that will end all cyber crime and cyber warfare, but as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, we have heard over the course of several years now that improving the exchange of information and the sharing of that information, company to company and company to the government, can be very helpful and yield a real and significant improvement to cyber security. Regrettably, this is the third attempt to pass a cyber security information sharing bill. In the almost 5 years that I have been working on this issue, two things have become abundantly clear about passing the bill. First, it must be bipartisan. In 2012, I cosponsored the Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act, which included a title on information sharing based on a bill I had introduced. It was an important piece of legislation, but it received almost no Republican support and could not gain the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture. It became clear to me then that no cyber security legislation could pass without broad bipartisan support. The second lesson that has been learned is, it must be narrowly focused.…”