Dutch Ruppersberger: “I yield myself such time as I may consume. In closing, I want to say again that the purpose of this bill, as the…”

“I yield myself such time as I may consume. In closing, I want to say again that the purpose of this bill, as the chairman just said, is very basic and simple. We want to protect our citizens from attacks. We are being attacked as we speak right now. Just last year, it was estimated we lost $300 billion worth of trade secrets. We even know that one country is attacking a fertilizer company to find out how we make it better than they do. This is putting our businesses in jeopardy and jobs in jeopardy, and we know we sure need jobs. More importantly, those of us who work in this field know how serious these threats are. The head of our FBI, whose responsibility it is to provide our domestic national security, has said that one of the most serious threats, if not a bigger threat, in terrorism would be a catastrophic cyberattack. We've already talked today about what that would be. We have Secretary Napolitano, the Director of Homeland Security, who has said the same thing: that it is one of the most serious issues our country has to deal with. It's unfortunate, but most of our citizens aren't aware of how serious this threat is. So we've attempted to allow our intelligence community, which is one of the best in the world, to have the ability to see these threats coming in from other countries or from terrorist groups and to be able right now to give this information over to the private sector to protect us, you, me, our businesses. That's what this bill does. Nothing more.…”