Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator from Missouri. I will wrap up by making three points and I will make them briefly. I have given remarks at greater length in these areas before so I think my position on this is pretty clear. One is, protecting our critical infrastructure, the privately owned systems our way of life depends on, is the weak point we need to address. We do well with dot-mil, we do well with dot-gov. The government has the authority to provide all of its resources to protect those. We don't particularly care about ordinary Web sites, about chat rooms--we do not want to interfere with those anyway. It is just the critical infrastructure that is important, the privately held infrastructure. We really need to work on that. The warnings from our national security leaders are across the board: Secretary of Defense Panetta, NSA Cyber Command and Director Keith Alexander, Director of National Intelligence Clapper, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, Attorney General Holder, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Dempsey have all clearly expressed the danger of this threat. The second point, it is bipartisan. The former Director of National Intelligence and NSA Director Mike McConnell has said: The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing. It's that simple. As the most wired nation on Earth, we offer the most targets of significance, yet our cyber- defenses are woefully lacking. . . . [W]ith cybersecurity, the time to start was yesterday.…”