Commodity End-User Relief Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. TAKAI. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

My amendment is simple and would help to address cyber vulnerabilities for stored government information at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

As the bill is currently written, section 206 would require the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to come up with a 5-year plan on technology acquisition. My amendment would add reporting requirements to Congress on plans of actions and milestones for any known information security vulnerability.

My amendment would include a detailed timeline with specific deadlines for addressing the known threats to make sure we get any threat dealt with and solved in a reasonable amount of time.

Mr. Chairman, we have seen recently that cybersecurity is a serious threat to our security, where just last week the personal information of over 4 million Federal employees was compromised. This was one of the largest known cyber attacks on Federal networks in our history and only further underscores the necessity of this amendment.

As we know, this threat is very real. Networks are being attacked constantly by a variety of different actors and for different reasons. For example, there is evidence that our financial institutions have been targeted, and other actors are out to steal one of the best drivers that we have of our economic growth: intellectual property.

Cybersecurity is a problem that the entire government needs to address. The CFTC will be storing very sensitive information, and they should have a plan to place privacy safeguards on this information when storing government data.

If we are going to discuss budgeting for technology acquisition, we should also be discussing looking at information security vulnerabilities, a plan to address them, and have reporting requirements along the way.

This amendment is common sense, and I urge my colleagues to support its adoption.

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