Cyber Security

Floor Speech

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Mr. DAINES. Mr. President, this generation is at the forefront of technological advances. In fact, it is making the United States and this generation that lives here one of the best networked in history, in fact, not only here but around the world.

The need for new and better technology to accommodate such a generation has also left a gaping hole in the security of our country. In recent years, cyber security attacks and breaches have multiplied and left American citizens incredibly vulnerable. Make no mistake, the cyber security of the United States is in great danger. But, unfortunately, proper precautions and reforms needed to set a better course have yet to be taken.

Just look at last week's headlines. USA Today recently reported hackers have attempted to compromise the Department of Energy over 1,100 times between 2010 and 2014, and these attackers have been successful over 150 times.

In a 2013 breach these attackers gained access to the information of over 104,000 Energy Department employees. After these attacks, the auditors noted ``unclear lines of responsibility'' and ``lack of awareness by responsible officials.'' Yet nothing was done to mitigate the potential for future attacks.

Our government needs to stop being content with simply being reactive to serious cyber threats. There are no deterrents or consequences to these foreign attackers. Not one person at the Department of Energy has faced consequences. The CIO of the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, remains in charge after one of the largest hacks on Federal employees.

In an age ruled by technology, it is our responsibility to make sure we take the necessary steps to protect the information of the American people.

This past Monday I held the first biannual Montana High Tech Jobs Summit in my hometown of Bozeman at my alma mater, Montana State University. We had over 600 Montanans attend.

We need to be more disruptive of the status quo in the technology sector, rather than passively sitting by as other nations innovate and leave us behind. We need to encourage STEM education in our classrooms and bring more people into the science and technology sector.

In my home State of Montana, high-tech jobs are growing 10 times faster than the statewide job growth rate. Last year alone, 40 percent of the wage growth in our entire State took place in Gallatin County, the county where Bozeman is located, and it has become a hub of technology. Yet too often Montana kids have to leave to find work. We need more high-paying technology jobs in Montana.

During my time at the cloud computing company RightNow Technologies, which was founded, started up, and grew to a company that was acquired by Oracle for $1.8 billion, over the 12 years I was there, I saw firsthand how Montana is becoming a leading hub for innovation and high-tech job growth. Montana has a qualified workforce and an unparalleled quality of life that makes our State a wise investment for tech companies. In fact, where the campus of our software company is located in Bozeman we are just minutes away from the Gallatin River. The Gallatin River is where the movie ``A River Runs Through It'' was filmed, where Brad Pitt made his debut, and directed by Robert Redford.

This tech summit showcased the great work done in our State, a State where we can combine the quality of life of fishing, hunting, backpacking, mountain climbing, spending time with family outdoors with technology and create a world-class high-tech company, because millennials want to have that quality of life, but they also want to have a world-class career in building global companies.

This tech summit allowed our Nation's tech leaders to share their views and experiences and encouraged our future tech leaders to lead. It provided a unique opportunity for our State's tech and business leaders to learn from one another. We had a great slate of speakers and panelists from across the technology industry: Laef Olson, the senior VP for cloud operations at Oracle; Dr. Dava Newman, a Montana native and the new Deputy Administrator at NASA. We had two of the five FCC Commissioners, Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly. We had Doug Burgum, the former CEO and chairman of Great Plains Software. Great Plains Software was started up in North Dakota. He grew that company. It was acquired by Microsoft in 2001 for $1.1 billion, the largest acquisition at that time for Microsoft. Now Doug is cofounder and partner of Arthur Ventures and chairman of the Kilbourne Group. We had Craig Barrett. Dr. Craig Barrett received his undergrad, master's, and Ph.D. at Stanford and was a professor at Stanford for 10 years in metallurgical engineering and then went to this small company in 1974 called Intel. There, he rose all the way to CEO, and in fact, worked with Gordon Moore, who became CEO of Intel and who is famous for Moore's law.

Mike Goguen, the managing director of Sequoia Capital, a company that was an early initial investor in companies such as Google, YouTube, Apple, PayPal. We had Will Lansing, a former board member of RightNow Technologies who is now the CEO of FICO. We had Matt Rose, the BNSF Railway executive chairman.

We had panelists as well who explored issues of critical importance to our technology sector, cyber security infrastructure, and our economy. All convened in Bozeman on Monday. One doesn't think of the Gallatin Valley as being a hub of technology--maybe the Silicon Valley--but as the world is changing, as technology removes geography as a constraint, you have a quality of life that is exceptional, where you are an hour away from Yellowstone National Park and can grow world-class tech companies there.

We heard from cyber security professionals from Microsoft and Facebook that we need not only to run faster, technically speaking, but work together between the private and public sectors to fend off potential hackers.

We heard how technology is removing geography as a constraint. We heard how companies are adopting innovative cyber security practices to keep information safe while maintaining global competitiveness. We learned about the importance of maintaining and advancing our technology infrastructure and the factors that affect start-up companies willing to grow, attract investments, and create jobs.

We have great technology leaders moving our country forward and working to protect our country, but we need to run faster than those seeking to destroy us. We need to ensure that we don't have burdensome regulations facing our entrepreneurs and our companies.

We need to continue to encourage policies that drive innovation.

I yield the floor.

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