On the recordApril 26, 2012
I thank Chairman Issa for yielding. Madam Speaker, I want to commend the chairman and the ranking member for working together and bringing this important bill to the floor. I also want to commend the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Chaffetz), who was a member of our task force and, as the chairman noted, has done so much work on this. Madam Speaker, this is an important bill on cybersecurity. The FISMA law passed in 2002 needs to be updated. The growth in the number and sophistication of the threats has not been matched by our response, and so laws and policies are increasingly outdated and not able to keep up with the threats faced by Federal networks as well as private sector networks. And this bill requires continuous monitoring, as you have heard. The threat is dynamic. It changes. It doesn't work anymore to just check a box and say, I've done this. You have to have that continuous monitoring of what's happening within your networks. That's important for defense of the Federal Government, but it's also important to be an example for the rest of the country. And in cybersecurity, it seems to me, it's particularly important for the Federal Government to lead by example. I also want to just say that this is an example of an issue, a part of cybersecurity, on which everybody agrees needs to happen, and this committee has brought a bipartisan answer.…
