Political Quotes

“Madam President, while the Senator is still on the floor, I wish to engage in a brief colloquy, ad-libbing this or, as I recall in football, an audible. We have the two people who are most key to this, Senator Lieberman, chairman of our committee, and Senator Collins, our ranking member, who worked very hard with their staff and our staffs to fashion this legislation. In recent years when we heard opposition to doing something on cyber security, the concern we had was there was going to be a top-down. There was going to be Homeland Security, which in its early days did not have a very good reputation. The idea was that somehow Homeland Security was going to be running this top down without a whole lot of input from industry. Basically we have taken even the second most recent version of our bill, and we changed that. What we said is it is not going to be top-down, it is not going to be Homeland Security saying these are the best practices, these are the standards to protect cyber security. Instead we said: Industry, what do you want to tell us? ``Us'' being Homeland Security, ``us'' being the Department of Defense, ``us'' being the National Security Agency, ``us'' being the FBI. What do you think those best practice standards should be? Give us a chance to work on those together. Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think the deal here is for Homeland Security to say: You have to throw those away; those make no sense, we will do it our way.…”