The work of a generation is beginning here, with your hearings, and you have the full measure of my gratitude and support.
What has a great value to us as a nation is the internet itself. The internet is critical infrastructure to the United States. We use the internet for every communication that businesses rely on every day.
People have to be free to investigate computer security. People have to be free to look for the vulnerabilities and create proof of concept code to show that they are true vulnerabilities in order for us to secure our systems.
The internet has to be protected from intrusive monitoring or else the medium upon which we all rely for the basis of our economy and our normal life, we’ll lose that, and it’s going to have broad effects as a consequence that we cannot predict.
The community of technical experts who really manage the internet, who built the internet and maintain it, are becoming increasingly concerned about the activities of agencies like the NSA or Cyber Command, because what we see is that defense is becoming less of a priority than offense.
I’m not a spy for Russia or China or any other country for that matter.
America should be cooling down the tensions in the internet, making it a more trusted environment, making it a more secure environment, making it a more reliable environment, because that’s the foundation of our economy and our future.
When it is made to appear as though not knowing everything about everyone is an existential crisis, then you feel that bending the rules is okay. Once people hate you for bending those rules, breaking them becomes a matter of survival.
US spend more on research and development than the other countries, so we shouldn’t be making the internet a more hostile, a more aggressive territory.
US has to be able to rely on a safe and interconnected internet in order to compete with other countries.
You can show a guy sort of peeking over the wall, you can see a guy tunneling underneath, you can see a guy going through the front door. All of those, in cyber terms, are vulnerabilities, because it’s not that you have to look for one hole of a specific type. It’s the whole paradigm.
When the lights go out at a power plant sometime in the future, we’re going to know that that’s a consequence of deprioritizing defense for the sake of an advantage in terms of offense.
The United States is more reliant on the technical systems. We’re more reliant on the critical infrastructure of the internet than any other nation out there. And when there’s such a low barrier to entering the domain of cyber-attacks we’re starting a fight that we can’t win.
The United States need to be focusing more on creating a more secure, more reliable, more robust, and more trusted internet, not one that’s weaker, not one that relies on this systemic model of exploiting every vulnerability, every threat out there.
I think the public still isn’t aware of the frequency with which the cyber-attacks, as they’re being called in the press, are being used by governments around the world, not just the US.
There are cyber threats out there, this is a dangerous world, and we have to be safe, we have to be secure no matter the cost.
We have to be able to reject disproportionate and unjustified responses in the cyber domain just as we do in the physical domain.
We need to put the security back in the National Security Agency. We can’t have the national surveillance agency.
We’ve seen a departure from the traditional work of the National Security Agency. They’ve become sort of the national hacking agency, the national surveillance agency. And they’ve lost sight of the fact that everything they do is supposed to make us more secure as a nation and a society.
If an adversary didn’t target our power plants but they did target the core routers, the backbones that tie our internet connections together, entire parts of the United States could be cut off. That would have a tremendous impact on us as a society and it would have a policy backlash.
We should never allow computers to make inherently governmental decisions in terms of the application of military force, even if that’s happening on the internet.