Joe Lieberman

I always resist the business/government analogies because they are not quite perfect because government is held to other standards than businesses.

It has proven difficult so far this year to find bipartisan consensus on many issues here in the Senate.

We need to find the right way to bring the capabilities of government together with the capabilities of the private sector.

The question there that we raise is whether they ought to be protected from liability overall because they were acting pursuant to an order of the President of the United States.

So a kind of public incentive or shame?

So we start with priorities.

So thank you. You actually answered my second question before I asked it, which was what are we doing to make sure that the Department of Homeland Security in some sense leverages on the expertise that DOD and NSA have rather than…

Thank you very much for your leadership of this issue.

This is not a partisan debate. It is a national security debate.

I think we can say that our country is, in a number of ways, safer, I think maybe much safer, than it was on September 10, 2001.

If there is anyone who does not believe that we urgently need to pass strong cybersecurity legislation, I would tell them to look at some of the high-profile computer attacks that have happened in the past several months.

Thanks, Senator Collins.

Good. No, that is very helpful, because our bill, as you know, has a provision for limited liability protection as another incentive.

I share Senator Collins' sense of irony about this, truly.

There is no more important issue that we need to address in the immediate future than that of cybersecurity.

This is going to take all of us working together.

It is very much intended to be a light-touch approach, but one that we believe, over time, will move the private sector and critical infrastructure in the right way.

I have been really impressed with the folks that we have in NIST.

I think the country would be better off if we did create some new law regarding the authority of the President to act in these emergencies.

This could, unfortunately, end up as a real obstacle to the passage of the bill, the failure to do something about liability.

The White House and Committee bills have a generally similar proposal, although as you know, we give DHS the authority to evaluate the plans as opposed to third-party.

We want to hear that voice. But in the case of a really catastrophic emergency, I think we want to be clear that the President has authority to act.

It has been one of the best experiences of my life. It has been a real opportunity to serve my country.

My bill aims to address these problems and to take Congress out of the day-to-day management of the Postal Service.

It is unacceptable that the Postal Service has no plans to date to begin replacing its aging fleet.