Secure Federal File Sharing Act

Floor Speech

I join with the chairman on a bipartisan basis to support this important legislation. As the chairman said--who, quite frankly, has done an inordinate amount of work on this, including multiple hearings over a period of time--although we have succeeded in some limited way in addressing this problem, when we revisited it after more than a year, we discovered some of the examples the chairman gave us, including the First Family's safe house being made vulnerable.

Mr. Speaker, as you can imagine, everything we do in government, everything we order in government has a cost. The CBO has scored this one at $10 million over its life, about $2 million to $3 million a year. What is the cost of the loss of the President? What is the cost of a soldier's orders to deploy being made public? What is the cost of your tax returns being made public? What is the cost to sensitive national defense information or, in fact, the leaking of people who are in the clandestine service? All of that has been shown to be at risk as long as peer-to-peer continues to operate on the Federal system.

Mr. Speaker, directing the Office of Management and Budget to create the guidance for prohibiting download or installation by government employees of these pieces of software, which are essentially spy software, spy software on behalf of those who sell this information and sell access to this information is, in fact, essential. File sharing within the Federal workforce and within Congress is closely monitored. We do have the ability to do file transfer protocol in a secure way. Clearly, though, as our hearings have shown, those who market this software to the public, usually for free, do so with backdoors deliberately there that make it enticing to those who want access, and that's how their revenue comes.

Our hearings have shown that the very players who will provide you peer-to-peer for free so that you can get thousands of videos, plenty of music, and exchange pictures often do so specifically so that you unwittingly open up all of your information.

Mr. Speaker, the American people deserve to have the information entrusted to us, their private information, kept private. Without this important legislation, that private information is consistently being made public through backdoor software installed by well-meaning individuals who only intended to share their summer pictures and not release the information on soldiers in harm's way. I urge strongly support for this legislation.

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Mr. Chairman, it is you that we owe a great debt of thanks to. You've championed this. You've made sure both at the subcommittee and the full committee that we've had a thorough evaluation. We've given the companies who claim that they are well-meaning opportunity repeatedly to show that they could fix or would fix their software, only to discover they did not fix their software. So I join with you in commending our staff on both sides of the aisle for the hard work they did, for the individual research, and for some of the other organizations who were concerned about the safety of the American people's vital information for helping us shed light on this. I know this is a good piece of legislation. I know we're going to have to work to get it through the Senate. I look forward to doing that with you, Mr. Chairman.

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