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Floor Speech
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Mr. KING. 1337 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
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Mr. KING. Madam President, I want to express some thoughts on this motion that was just objected to.
We are in an ongoing, serious, and debilitating conflict in the world of cyber.
It is one of the most serious threats this country faces. In fact, right at this moment, it is probably the most serious threat this country faces from nation-states, from hacktivists, from ransomware, from crooks around the world. It is a serious daily challenge.
We are being attacked--institutions in this country, including the U.S. Government, including the Department of Defense, including the CIA, but also private sector businesses are being attacked 5 billion times a day.
I visited a small bank in Maine that is being attacked in the hundreds of thousands of times in a week, a small local bank. I have talked to utility executives that are being attacked--one major utility--3 million times a day, that the adversaries are trying to get into our systems to compromise them, which would be devastating in a time of conflict.
Imagine for a moment a shot isn't fired, but the financial system collapses; water systems are poisoned; the electrical system is down; the gas pipeline system is compromised; healthcare, hospitals are down. That is a devastating attack. By not moving this bill, we are unilaterally disarming in the midst of this crisis.
What this bill does is very simple. It simply renews an authority that was passed in 2015 to create a mechanism where the private sector and the Federal Government can exchange information about cyber attacks.
The private sector is protected from liability for exchanging, for sharing the information. Then the government can collect that information, warn other sectors of potential attacks that are indicated in these kinds of reports, can help the victims respond, and also can help us to form a more coherent national strategy to deal with these attacks.
I don't understand why the gentleman from Kentucky is objecting to-- and this isn't a spending bill. This has nothing to do with the continuing resolution. This is simply an authority that has been in place, as I say, for 10 years. It expired at the end of the fiscal year, and we want to extend that in order to maintain this kind of interaction, this kind of exchange of information that is critical to our ability to realistically confront this really--I can't overemphasize how serious this crisis is.
We just learned, for example, that the Chinese were in our telecommunication system. We know that the Russians have made consistent efforts to penetrate our critical infrastructure, along with the Chinese. This is not an abstract threat. This is before us right now. It is happening right now. And if we don't pass this extension, as I said, we are unilaterally disarming.
I understand the chairman of the committee has some other items that he would like to consider. He is the chairman of the committee. I urge him to bring those issues before the committee, bring a bill to the floor, and they can be considered. But don't, in the meantime, hobble our ability to protect our citizens and entities, people and companies and businesses and our own government, from these ongoing attacks.
At this very moment, this government is under attack by cyber criminals, by state actors. They are not doing it for fun. They are doing it maliciously to undermine our country and also to steal from us.
The amount stolen through ransomware attacks, which can occur, by the way, at a local hospital or a town--the amount of money is in the billions every year.
So I hope that as we keep coming to the floor to bring this matter up, we can have the withdrawal of the objection by the chairman of the committee because--the final thing I will say is what I said before: This is no time to be lowering our defenses, to be compromising our ability to defend ourselves from an attack that we know is happening and that we know is going to continue to happen.
We know that this is going to continue. This attack is going to continue on our country, on our institutions, on our businesses, on our citizens, and we have to be on guard. We cannot--we cannot--allow this authority to lapse and compromise our ability to defend ourselves and the people of the United States.
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