Mr. President, I rise to speak about the Cyber Security Public Awareness Act of 2011, which I have introduced with Senator Kyl. The damage caused by malicious activity in cyberspace is enormous and unrelenting. Every year, cyber attacks inflict vast damage on our Nation's consumers, businesses, and government agencies. This constant cyber assault has resulted in the theft of millions of Americans' identities; exfiltration of billions of dollars of intellectual property; loss of countless American jobs; vulnerability of critical infrastructure to sabotage; and intrusions into sensitive government networks. These massive attacks have not received the attention they deserve. Instead, we as a nation remain woefully unaware of the risks that cyber attacks pose to our economy, our national security, and our privacy. This problem is caused in large part by the fact that cyber threat information ordinarily is classified when it is gathered by the government or held as proprietary when collected by a company that has been attacked. As a result, Americans do not have an appropriate sense of the threats that they face as individual Internet users, the damage inflicted on our businesses and the jobs they create, or the scale of the attacks undertaken by foreign agents against American interests. We must not wait for a disaster before we recognize and respond to the cyber threats we face. A false sense of complacency is not a security strategy.…
On the recordApril 14, 2011
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