Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2015--Motion to Proceed--

Floor Speech

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I have an inquiry. I believe there will be a series of speakers coming to the floor to address the issue of digital security. I don't know if my colleague, the Senator from Ohio, has a long statement.

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, first of all, I thank both of my colleagues for their very important work on the issue before the Senate today. I, like them, have a State where both opioid and heroin abuse is taking too many lives and destroying too many families. I look forward to successfully moving forward on this legislation. Digital Security

Mr. President, I rise to join several of my colleagues in a conversation on digital security. Since last year, I have been working with the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Texas Republican Michael McCaul, to set up a Commission of experts to study digital security and issues around encryption. These issues have been somewhat in the news, and we have seen court cases in both California and New York.

I say to my colleagues that this is one component the Commission is trying to address. We are at the beginning of a debate that is even broader than the current cases being litigated in California and New York, which will encompass the whole world with digital security. If you think the issues we face now are challenging, as our country and the world move more toward the Internet, such as having your refrigerator respond to your voice, this issue around digital security is only going to grow.

I have a background with the technology community and Chairman McCaul has a background with the law enforcement community. Unfortunately, over the last few months, we have seen folks from the tech community, the law enforcement community, and the privacy community talk past each other too often. We have seen this issue addressed without a common set of facts. We have now seen situations arise that have basically pitted law enforcement against technology. We think the approach we are taking--bipartisan legislation that was introduced on Monday--is the appropriate way to go.

I am joined by my partner in the Senate, Senator Gardner. We have Senator Collins, Senator Bennet, and my good friend Senator King.

Mr. President, regardless of where people fall in this debate, digital security tools are terribly important. Encryption is essential to protecting our personal information, our financial information, our intellectual capital, and our national security, and this is one issue in which the heads of law enforcement and the heads of the intelligence community as recently as 2 weeks ago--Senator King and Senator Collins, who are on the Intelligence Committee--have said that encryption is here to stay and is extraordinarily important.

We have seen challenges around this technological innovation come very quickly. Think about this: Nearly 2,000 new applications are submitted to the App Store every day. That is how quickly this world is changing. The majority of these new applications that are added to that App Store are actually produced overseas. Two-thirds of these new apps use some level of encryption.

I follow this from a policy standpoint but also my personal background in the telecommunication industry for over 20 years. I can say that the networks we deal with today in terms of the Internet, the cloud, are infinitely more complicated than the distributed top-down network that existed in the 1990s when the Congress most recently addressed some of these issues. The Internet today is no longer top down. The fundamental architecture of the Internet is decentralized and resilient. We have seen on countless occasions in the past that telecom traffic shifts quickly from one area to another, and attempts by any government to channel that traffic in a certain way in fact often results in shifts that make it harder for government, law enforcement, and intelligence to stay abreast of the activity.

Obviously, Mr. President, many of these issues have been public since Edward Snowden's disclosure 3 years ago. I think that disclosure did great harm to our country. We have seen more recently, in the press, this debate crystallize after terrorist events and court activities in both California and New York.

What we are doing--these Members in the Senate and Members in the House--in a bipartisan way is saying: Let's sit down together and work through a common set of facts, a common collaborative approach, so that before more time elapses and positions harden any further, we bring something together now to sort through these complicated issues.

We all need to be working, as I said before, from the same set of facts. We need a framework for collaborative conversation. Too often I have heard from law enforcement and tech in recent months that we need to get into a room and try to sort these things through. Unfortunately, a static, American-only solution won't get us solving the problem. I believe it will simply drive the bad guys, the criminals and terrorists--at least the smart ones, anyway--off of American technology, away from American platforms, and move more and more criminals and terrorists to foreign-based hardware and software and at the end of the day actually make the safety and security of the United States far more out of reach.

I know at the outset some of my colleagues here questioned whether a commission is the right way, done too often. Congress has used commissions in the past to punt the solution. The model we have taken, working with great assistance from Senator Collins, is the 9/11 Commission.

In the event of a national tragedy, a congressionally mandated Commission came together on a series of policy recommendations, the overwhelming majority of which were implemented by the Congress. That is why the 16-member Commission, modelled after the 9/11 Commission, has been endorsed by a wide range of stakeholders, from the tech sector, to respected academic and legal experts and distinguished national security figures. As a matter of fact--and this doesn't happen that often--our Commission proposal has even been endorsed by the editorial boards of both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. These validators agree with us: A bipartisan, bicameral Digital Security Commission is a productive path forward.

All these issues are not easy. What is great about America is that we are a country of innovators and of problem-solvers. I know that if we stop talking past each other and put the right people in a room, we can find the right solutions that protect us all, and then Congress can act.

Mr. President, I know we are going to hear from a number of my colleagues. I would like to now yield the floor to my friend and colleague on this issue, the Senator from Colorado, Mr. Gardner.

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, he stated that correctly. This is not an either/or circumstance. We have to protect Americans' privacy. We have to make sure we protect Americans' lives and liberty from criminals and terrorists. We also need to ensure that we continue to promote American innovation. And I believe there is a way through this, and I appreciate his good work as we move forward on this important piece of legislation.

Let me ask someone who has seen this process work before, a longtime member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Homeland Security Committee who helped shape this legislation, my friend and colleague from Maine.

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I thank Senator Collins from Maine for her comments today and for her good work on the Intelligence Committee and for her good work on the Homeland Security Committee and the fact that she has thought through these issues in a different framework--when our country was attacked--after 9/11. I would simply add that if some in Congress or elsewhere had come through with this kind of collaboration a few years back, we might not now be having two cases--one in New York and one in California--where, at least it appears at first blush, the courts are coming at it from very different directions.

Let me reemphasize that in America the only solution here could simply drive criminals and terrorists to foreign-based technology, hardware, and software. In many ways, to get this right, if we are going to prevent a balkanization of the Internet, which is not in America's interests and not in most countries' interests, we need to at least think through this from an international perspective.

Let us hear now from a former Governor, like myself, and a great member of the Intelligence Committee. I thank him for joining in this effort. As Senator Collins said, we have a broad breadth of ideological viewpoints from these eight bipartisan original sponsors here in the Senate, and I think more will be joining us.

I would simply add that on a day where a lot of the Nation's focus is on Super Tuesday and on some of the activities that are taking place in the Presidential debates, it is great to see such responsible Members from both parties step forward in a bipartisan way to address a very serious issue, both today and in the future, for our country.

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