National Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Act of 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANGEVIN. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 3696, H.R. 2952, and H.R. 3107.

I want to thank Ranking Member Thompson, Chairman MEEHAN, and Ranking Member Clarke for their hard work in bringing these bills to the floor today.

Most especially and in particular, I want to thank Chairman McCaul, the chairman of the full Homeland Security Committee, who also serves with me as a founder and a cochair of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus. I want to thank him for his dedication to bringing these bills to the floor today and for his commitment to enacting strong cybersecurity legislation. In today's political climate, moving significant reform in a consensus manner is exceptionally difficult, and this success reflects Chairman McCaul's bipartisan approach.

Mr. Speaker, we all know that we depend on cyberspace and the Internet every day. It is vitally important to the American people. It is an inseparable part of our everyday lives. It is in everything that we do--vital to everything from banking to national security--but it is also highly contested. Unfortunately, the pace of the threats is ever-increasing. We see them every day, whether it is the theft of personal information or of credit card information that is used for criminal intent or whether it is the theft of intellectual property that costs America its competitiveness and jobs. We also know of the threats to our critical infrastructure in particular, both to our electric grid and to our financial system--things that I have been calling attention to for years now.

We must tap into our creative and innovative spirit to address today's challenges and position ourselves to be agile in the face of both today's threats as well as tomorrow's. I believe that the three bills that are before us today, in conjunction with the information sharing and other measures passed by this House earlier in this Congress, will help to enable a better future for our Nation's cyberspace capabilities.

I know, Mr. Speaker, that we will never be 100 percent secure in cyberspace. It is an ever-evolving and moving threat, and we will never be 100 percent secure. Yet I do know this: that we can close that aperture of vulnerability down to something that is much more manageable, and I urge my colleagues to support the bills that are before us today.

I thank the gentleman from Texas for his leadership, and I strongly urge the support of these three bills.

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