Protecting Cyber Networks Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. HIMES. Madam Chairwoman, I would like to thank my friend from California for yielding time and start by saying that I am thrilled to be standing here to urge support for the Protecting Cyber Networks Act. I would like to thank and congratulate Chairman Nunes, Ranking Member Schiff, and the chairman of the subcommittee on which I serve as ranking member, Mr. Westmoreland, for coming together at a time when this Congress is accused, often rightly so, of being dysfunctional to take a very substantial step to secure the networks on which so much of our lives today depend.

As ranking member of the Cybersecurity Subcommittee, my daily travels every single day expose me to people who say the single most important thing we as a Congress can do today to advance the security of our networks, to protect Americans, their financial records, their health records and, of course, even more ominously, to protect them against potential attack against our utilities and any sort of thing that our antagonists around the world would seek to do to us, the single most important thing we can do is to do what we are doing today, which is to set up a rubric whereby the very good people within the private sector who focus on this day in and day out can communicate threats to each other and communicate with the experts within the United States Government to work as a team to counter very, very serious threats. This rubric has been set up with ample attention and good attention to the very legitimate privacy claims and the liberties that we all take so seriously.

The stakes are high. We saw what happened at Sony. We saw what happened at Anthem. We know all the attacks that have been leveled internationally that destroyed computers. This is the reality that we live with, and this is a very big step, an information-sharing protocol that will counter those who wish us ill.

I would note that the privacy protections in this bill are considerably better, as the chairman and ranking member have pointed out, than those that were in the bill of the last Congress. The objections of those who are focused on privacy have been dealt with point by point. And while I won't say that the bill is perfect, this bill does what it needs to do to protect the privacy of the American people by obligating everyone to work hard to scrub personally identifiable information from any code, any information that is exchanged.

I have learned in my 6 years here that we don't produce perfection, and it is my hope that as this bill proceeds through the legislative path that we will work even harder to make sure we are very clear about definitions and, in fact, are protecting the privacy rights of Americans as best as we can. But in the meantime we have taken a very big step forward in a bipartisan fashion in a way that will make America, its people, and its networks more secure. For that, I am grateful to the leadership and urge support of the Protecting Cyber Networks Act.

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