Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlewoman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of S. 2382. As the author of the National Cyber Director Act, I commend Senators Portman and Peters for offering this important legislation to clarify the authorities of this new office. I said it before and I will say it again: Cybersecurity is the national and economic security challenge of the 21st century. For 30 years we have been increasing the number of connected devices, processes, and services connected to the internet at an exponential rate. We can now instantly communicate with people half a world away and use data repositories to drive advances in medicine, clean energy, and commerce. With this connectivity comes vulnerability. For these three decades, the United States has struggled to develop a coherent cybersecurity strategy and to implement it to better protect the country and cyberspace. While we have seen the results of this failure in breaches ranging from the devastating, the tens of billions of dollars in damage caused by, for example, NotPetya, to the mundane, as companies fend off daily cyber probes. Just in the last half century we have witnessed the Russian Government target us through ransomware attacks through SolarWinds; the Chinese Government break into instances of the Microsoft Exchange Server, and criminals wreak havoc on the Colonial Pipeline, JBS, and customers of Kaseya through ransomware attacks, so we are not where we need to be.…”