Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise to respond to the statement of the majority leader--first, to say that I share his sadness and disappointment that he had to file a cloture motion on this Cybersecurity Act, but I totally agree with the decision he has made. I do not think he had any choice. I think we are facing on the one hand an urgent, real, and growing threat to our security and our prosperity because we are vulnerable; that is, the privately owned cyber infrastructure of our country is vulnerable to attack from foreign enemies, from nonstate actors such as terrorist groups, from organized criminal gangs who are just out to steal billions of dollars over the Internet, and from hackers. So we are dealing with a real problem that all the nonpolitical security experts from the last administration, the Bush administration, and this one, the Obama administration, say is rising rapidly to being the No. 1 threat to American security. Over the Internet now, because of our vulnerability over cyber space, a foreign enemy can do us more damage than the terrorists did to us on 9/11. It is that stark. So that is one reality. The other reality is that Senator Collins and I, Senator Rockefeller and Senator Feinstein, have been working literally for years. As Senator Reid said, because of the urgency of the problem, we decided we cannot just fight for 100 percent of what we thought was best to protect our security. We pulled back; we made it not mandatory.…”