Cyber Security

Floor Speech

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Mr. REID. Mr. President, the senior Senator from Kentucky is certainly right that we need to move on cyber security. I have known that for many years, and we have tried. Why have we not done something on it? Because of filibusters by the Republicans. We had a bill that had been worked on for years that we brought before the Senate. But instructions were given from the Chamber of Commerce, and the Republicans dutifully walked down here and voted no, stopping us from moving forward on the bill. The Chamber said--and obviously Republicans agreed--this is not something for the government. It should be done in-house.

Well, my friend the Republican leader rails against the government, but he should also understand that this is a situation which involves the private sector also. We could name 25 companies, 50 companies, 100 companies that have been hacked and hacked very badly, not the least of which are Sony and Target.

It is hard for me to comprehend that my friend, my counterpart, is here talking about the need to do something about cyber security when he is the leader of the Republicans who have stopped us from doing this.

There is a bill--it is not a perfect bill; it is far from it--a bipartisan bill. It has the support of the chairman and ranking member of the Intelligence Committee. We could get to work on that right now. We should do that. I repeat, it is not perfect legislation, but it is certainly a step forward.

My friend said he wants heads to roll. If that were the case, then there are a lot of heads to roll in the public sector and the private sector because they do not have the tools to do much about this hacking. We need to help them with appropriate legislation. I hope we can do that and do it very soon. I remain committed to turning to cyber security as quickly as we can. We need to get that done. I hope we can get that done. On that issue, we could go to that legislation right now. Do you know why we are not going to go to it right now? Because the Republicans have holds on the bill. So the Republican leader will file a motion to invoke cloture on moving forward on this legislation. We are ready to move on it now. Again, the problem is on the Republican side, not our side.

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