[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15605-15608]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                BACK TO CONGRESS TO PROTECT THE HOMELAND

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from California 
(Mr. Daniel E. Lungren) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. DANIEL E. LUNGREN of California. Mr. Speaker, on 9/11, I was in 
the city and, therefore, was an eyewitness to the impact of the attack 
on the United States in the Capital City.
  I had a friend who was on the airplane that was crashed into the 
Pentagon. There was a gentleman who was a partner in the law firm that 
I had just joined who was on that airplane. A young man who had 
attended school with my children and his family had worshiped at the 
same Catholic church was on the level hit by the first airplane in the 
Twin Towers.
  And understanding the nature of the attack against the United States, 
at that time, I felt a strong urging to once again be involved in 
public service. And that was the genesis of my decision, when the 
opportunity presented itself several years later, to return to this 
body. That was the compelling reason.
  I was privileged to be appointed to the permanent Homeland Security 
Committee, and I was privileged to serve as chairman of one of the 
subcommittees; and since that time, I have been privileged to continue 
to serve on that committee as well as to serve on the House Judiciary 
Committee where we had responsibility for, among other things, the 
PATRIOT Act and FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, both 
of which were, in my judgment--and are, in my judgment--essential to 
our response to the threat that existed at the time of their creation 
and the threat that remains.
  One of the ironies of my service is that I am elected from a district 
in Sacramento County, California, nearly 3,000 miles from the site of 
the attack in New York and the attack here in Washington, D.C. And 
while we have had a plot to blow up L.A. airport that was thwarted by 
tremendous work by a Federal employee on our northwestern border, it 
has been somewhat difficult to articulate in sufficient terms the 
threat that remains to us, as a Nation, to my constituency.
  But those in California are not alone in their failure to understand 
the urgency of the moment. I think we, as a Nation, have, as a result 
of the successes that we have achieved in our defense of this Nation, 
allowed ourselves some level of complacency and a misapprehension of 
the danger that remains.
  When I served in the Congress in my first tour of service from 
January of 1979 to January of 1989, I for several years was a member of 
the House Intelligence Committee. At that time, the phrase ``homeland 
security'' or the word ``homeland'' was never uttered. If you had 
uttered it then, it would have a foreign sense to it. Protect the 
homeland, wasn't that what Hitler was talking about? There was a 
strange notion to that term.
  It, of course, began to be used in normal parlance after 9/11. And 
now it regularly trips off our tongues, ``homeland security,'' ``the 
Committee on Homeland Security,'' ``the defense of the homeland,'' 
because we understand that the nature of the war in which we are 
presently engaged is very different than the wars that we have engaged 
in in the past.
  Those were wars of territorial conquest. Those were wars where you 
could gauge success or failure by the amount of territory that you had 
taken, by the number of people who had died, by the men and armaments 
that were proceeding into battle. And in some ways, you could 
anticipate the success or failure by the location of the troops, by the 
array of weapons.
  Today we're facing a very different threat. In addition to fighting 
the war that has gone on in the Middle East--with our men and women in 
uniform performing bravely and as well as any that we have ever had--we 
are now dealing with an enemy that is not defined as a nation-state 
solely, is not defined as a physical army moving to our shores but is 
in many ways engaged in the essence of asymmetric warfare. That is, not 
pitting one military force against a military force, one grouping of 
military equipment versus another but, rather, the essence of 
asymmetric

[[Page 15606]]

warfare in attempting to create psychological more than physical damage 
but physical damage if they may do so.

                              {time}  1650

  On 9/11, we suffered tremendous physical damage. We lost over 3,000 
people. We saw one of the symbols of American capitalism destroyed, one 
of the symbols of American free enterprise, one of the symbols of one 
of America's greatest cities. We also saw an attack on the Pentagon. It 
didn't destroy the Pentagon. It didn't cause the number of casualties 
you would see in a major battle, although every life lost was a 
tragedy; but it was a psychological blow to the United States. It was 
in some ways the foundational principle of terrorism.
  How do you exact the greatest amount of terror, a lack of confidence, 
a fear in a people, particularly in the civilian population, while 
doing what would be, relatively speaking, a small amount of damage? I 
don't want to diminish the amount of physical damage that was done, but 
relative to the scenes that we have seen from World War II for 
destruction of entire cities, for destruction of buildings and 
infrastructure that existed not for years, not for decades, but for 
centuries. Yet, the threat is as great as the threats we have faced 
before.
  Within the context of this war of terror, as opposed to the war on 
terror, because the war is really against those who would destroy us 
utilizing terror, I don't think you should define a war as against the 
tactics used by the enemy. You have to define the enemy. We've had some 
difficulty in doing that in part because of political correctness, but 
an essential part of this war on terror is found in the world of cyber. 
That's what I would like to address this evening for a few moments, 
cybersecurity.
  I think one of the great failings of this Congress and one of the 
things that I regret having not accomplished before I leave this House 
in several weeks is our successful addressing of the threat we find in 
the world of cyber. The cyberworld is difficult to grasp because you 
can't smell it, you can't feel it, you can't touch it, and you can't 
hear it. Yet it is embedded in virtually everything we do. If you would 
look at the world of computers, the world of technology, the world of 
connectivity of those things, and the wireless world--that is a term 
that needs to be defined, and we don't have the full time to talk about 
that because wireless means partly wireless instrumentalities and 
partly wired instrumentalities and partly cables, which are utilized to 
spread what started may end as wireless communications to distant 
lands. Nonetheless, because you can't physically see it in most 
instances, it is not readily apparent that it is there.
  While the essence of this new computerized technology-connected world 
allows us to do things we never dreamed of doing before, and while that 
enhances our standard of living and permits us to be able to receive 
goods and services and specific essential communications 
instantaneously from far away places, it also creates tremendous 
vulnerabilities. To the extent that you are connected, you're also 
vulnerable. To the extent that you rely on that connectivity to be able 
to send control decisions to distant places, you also create a 
vulnerability along that pathway; you create a vulnerability for 
someone who might be able to capture that control.
  And as you understand the place that the cyberworld plays in our 
critical infrastructure, that which gives us the guts of the 
underpinnings of our standard of living--power, electricity, water, 
just to name a few--you understand if someone controls those or 
interferes with those or sends off false messages on those, the world 
as we know changes. And if those who control in that way by hacking, by 
intervention, by malware, if they are successful, they change our 
standard of living tremendously, and not for the better.
  What do we have to do? In the first instance, we have to recognize 
the problem. In this body, we've not recognized that problem. In the 
Senate, they have not recognized that problem. With all due respect, 
even though I work very closely with the administration, it hasn't been 
priority enough. The public doesn't understand it or appreciate it in 
part because it is not a politically sexy thing to talk about.
  I grew up in southern California where a news director many years ago 
coined the phrase ``if it bleeds, it leads,'' meaning we will put it on 
TV if you can find a car crash. You find somebody bleeding somewhere, 
we'll put it on TV long before we'll put some good that someone has 
done on TV. Cybersecurity doesn't bleed until someone invades it, 
someone captures it.
  One of the remarkable things that happened over the last couple of 
years was something called Stuxnet, S-t-u-x-n-e-t. Stuxnet is an 
example of--I'll call it malware or a virus or whatever you want to 
call it. It was an intrusion into an already-existing IT system, the 
Iranian Government's system that they utilized for purposes of 
developing their nuclear weapons systems. At least that is what is 
suggested in the public press.
  According to the public press, whatever this was that was interjected 
there laid dormant for a period of time, gave off false signals that 
everything was okay to those who were operating the system, and then at 
some period of time carried out commands that were contrary to the 
integrity of the system, causing, as reported in public articles, the 
centrifuges in their nuclear system to basically destroy themselves.
  Why is that important? It was the first example we've seen publicly 
of a physical destruction of a system. I would call that in the nature 
of critical infrastructure as a result of a cyberattack. We've seen 
suggestions of other such things. Whoever did that, thank God they 
seemed to be on our side. But now the genie is out of the bottle. And 
if it were done by those who are friends of ours, what would happen if 
people captured it that were not friends of ours? Now that it has been 
done successfully, evidently they know it can be done. So you can have 
people who try and reverse engineer it, or you can have people just 
start from ground zero saying, look, it has been done, let us now 
theoretically determine how it was done and how we can do it. My point 
is once it has happened, we should understand that there are those who 
want to destroy us that will use it against us.
  Let me ask a question, and that would be: What would happen if 
someone introduced malware or viruses into several of the major medical 
or health systems in this Nation? If you went to the hospital and 
instead of you having accurately recorded what your blood is, you had 
another blood type and you're going to need a blood transfusion during 
that surgery, what if they were able to change the indications you have 
for indications or the contraindications that you have so you would be 
subjected to medicines that were not, in fact, good for you?

                              {time}  1700

  What if that happened in a couple of major health systems in this 
country in different parts of the country? Would that be a 
psychological attack on the Nation if we shook the confidence people 
had in the system? What if they were able to invade a financial 
services operation so that your account could not be verified and 
someone else's account couldn't be verified? What if, in fact, they 
controlled some of the systems that deal with our trains so that trains 
would be colliding rather than missing one another? What if they 
controlled the critical infrastructure that we call our water systems 
or our electricity delivery systems?
  I mean, these are real questions. What do we need to do? We need to 
understand that it's going to require cooperation and a collaboration 
between the public sector and the private sector.
  Look, I'm a small-government guy. I believe in limited government. I 
also believe that the limited government we have ought to work, that it 
ought to be robust. In my judgment, the Federal Government has a 
responsibility in the area of cybersecurity; and we have been, in some 
ways, not facing up to

[[Page 15607]]

that. This administration and the previous administration have done 
some tremendous work in advancing the cause--Congress has examined it; 
we've held hearings; we've put forth some proposals--but we haven't had 
a completed project. We need to do a number of things, it seems to me.
  Number one, we need to make sure that we understand that, as far as 
the Federal Government is concerned, the entry point for the private 
sector ought not to be NSA, because it's part of the military. It ought 
to be DHS. Some people say, I didn't like DHS. Well, DHS exists. It has 
for a decade. It has gotten more robust. It has gotten much, much 
better in terms of its competency in the area of cybersecurity. We 
ought to build on that. We ought to have that as the entry point so 
that we don't have a violation of what we know as posse comitatus, or 
the idea of civilian control over the military.
  NSA is unbelievably good. They're the best in the world at what they 
do, but we've got to make sure that there is the proper relationship. I 
think the previous administration and this administration have 
established the means of doing that, but it ought not to be the 
idiosyncratic answer by one administration to another. It ought to be 
institutionalized so we know that that's the permanent structure and 
that people can rely on it.
  Secondly, we need to create a platform of trust and confidence and 
experience between the public sector and the private sector to be able 
to utilize the information that comes to one or the other. What do I 
mean by that?
  When the Federal Government learns about cyberattacks that are taking 
place in one place, they ought to be able to give that information to 
other elements of the private sector on an immediate basis so they can 
protect themselves against that. At the same time, we ought to set up a 
platform to establish that confidence so that the private sector will 
feel better about giving their information to the government so that 
they can help them protect against that attack and let others know that 
that attack might be there. That comes with experience. That comes with 
trust and confidence that can only be established over time, and we 
need to have a structure that allows that to happen.
  I produced legislation to do that. Unfortunately, it never reached 
the floor of the House of Representatives for reasons I won't go into, 
but the fact of the matter is that we still need to do that. You can 
say you want to build trust by establishing something, but you have to 
have it established. You have to have people there. They have to 
understand one another. They have to work with one another. They have 
to gain that trust. That takes time. We need to do it immediately.
  We need to have some sort of means by which we work with the private 
sector that involves itself in critical infrastructure in such a way 
that the impact of a failure of that piece of infrastructure to the 
public will be protected against. Let me give you a simple example. 
This was an example that I paraphrased from former Secretary Chertoff.
  Let's say you are a piece of the critical infrastructure and that you 
realize that a failure will cause $1 billion worth of damage to your 
company, but that the impact on society may be $50 billion. The delta 
between $50 billion and $1 billion is one that has to be, in some ways, 
dealt with in terms of that relationship between the Federal Government 
and the private sector; and we haven't figured that out yet.
  My way of doing it was to create a voluntary program by which you 
would have different elements of our economy deal with DHS, with the 
support of others, coming up with what would be best business 
practices. Then, if those best business practices were adopted by those 
within that element of the economy, they would get liability 
protection, liability immunity. Now, some say, wait a second. That 
leads to the slippery slope, and the Federal Government is going to 
come in with a crash on you. Look, I don't know the perfect answer, but 
I was trying to find the lightest regulatory touch we could have.
  If those who are worried about the Federal Government becoming too 
heavy handed are truly concerned about that, they ought to think about 
this: if we have a successful cyberattack against a part of our 
critical infrastructure, my fear is that Congress and whoever is 
President at the time will overreact because the public will require 
it. Wouldn't it be better for us to anticipate it? Wouldn't it be 
better for us to get ahead of the crisis and then have a means by which 
we defend against it? We know we're not ever going to be totally, 100 
percent successful; so when it happens, we should diminish the impact 
on whatever part of critical infrastructure we have.
  Third, mitigate against the damage when it occurs; and, fourth, be 
available to rebuild, respond and have the services available to the 
public sooner rather than later.
  I had hoped to be here another 2 years to work on that--I will not 
be--but I will be on the outside, wherever I am and in whatever I do, 
urging this Congress to look this issue squarely in the face and to do 
something about it. I am absolutely convinced, as Secretary Panetta 
said, that one of the greatest threats to this Nation is a cyber-Pearl 
Harbor, and the potential of that is greater because the capacity to 
strike against the country is more diffuse than ever before.
  The capital investment for a successful cyberattack is much less than 
the capital investment needed for weapons of mass destruction. We ought 
to understand it, and we ought to understand that sooner rather than 
later. Cybersecurity ought to be an issue on the front burner of this 
Congress going forward. There ought to be an effort for the 
administration and the Congress--Democrat, Republican, conservative, 
liberal--to work for the good of this Nation.
  I can think of no external threat that is greater than the threat of 
cyberwarfare. As I leave this place, I don't know if I'd call it a 
confession, but it is an admission of mine that we have not done all 
we've needed to do. I'm not blaming anybody. In the aftermath of 9/11, 
the first thing we had to do was to try and protect against a similar 
attack. We have strengthened our air travel in this country. We have 
strengthened our security against an attack to our ports. We have 
strengthened our ability to protect against a terrorist attack on our 
chemical facilities, although we still need to do more there. We have 
protected our transportation systems to a greater extent than existed 
before. We have greater cooperation and coordination among all levels 
of law enforcement. There is a greater level of respect among the 
private sector parts and the public sector; but cybersecurity remains, 
in my judgment, the lagging indicator and the lagging response.
  I would hope that partisanship would be thrown aside. I would hope 
that fear of the government--although I understand that well and I've 
been a proponent of that--of an overly sized government and an overly 
strong government will be tempered in the sense that we understand the 
threat to all of us and to our standard of living in so many different 
ways is real and that, right now, we have the greatest minds working on 
cyber.
  The last thought is this: if any young person is looking for a job or 
a career for the rest of his or her life, start training in the area of 
cybersecurity. We need to do more in terms of our educational programs. 
We need to do more in terms of our training. China is training a lot 
more people in cybersecurity than we are. It's not just because they 
have a larger population; it's because they're dedicated to it. We 
could lose our edge if we don't do that.
  So I would ask this Congress going forward and I would ask this 
administration going forward to put cybersecurity at the front of the 
line, not at the back of the line, in terms of training our people, 
educating our young people, identifying this as a career path for so 
many of them, making the commitment in our government in terms of the 
budget that is necessary, but also in terms of that spirit of 
cooperation and collaboration that must exist between the private 
sector and the public sector.

[[Page 15608]]



                              {time}  1710

  We are at risk. There is a real and present danger out there. We have 
the capacity to respond to it. We have the ability to be the best in 
the world at this. We have the ability to protect ourselves better than 
any other country in the world, and we will if we will turn our face 
towards the problem rather than away from the problem.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the time. It is my hope that this 
country recognizes the threat, deals with the threat, and successfully 
looks to the future for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

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