Cyber Security

Floor Speech

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Mr. DAINES. Mr. President, the headlines in the past few months have been enough to paint a startling picture of how our Nation is handling technology and security these days.

Before I came to Congress, I spent 12 years working in the technology sector, but it doesn't take an extensive background in these fields to see that in the ever-changing realm of technology and online communication, America's constitutional freedoms and civil liberties are at risk and our security as a nation is under attack.

When it comes to protecting American citizens' privacy and personal information, we as a nation need to respond to the new threats our enemies are posing and the new tactics they are using and demand equal vigilance from those in our government who claim they have American safety at heart.

The modern battlefield is changing. We see it changing before our very eyes, and America needs to adapt. With the incredible advantages that modern technology offers, also with that come greater risks as well as greater responsibility. Our enemies, America's enemies, are utilizing social media in particular to recruit others to their side to plot against our rights, our freedoms, our American way of life.

As Michael Steinbach, the Assistant Director at the FBI's Counterterrorism Division, said to the House Homeland Security Committee just last month: ``The foreign terrorist now has direct access into the United States like never before.''

We know for a fact that ISIS aggressively uses social media to spread its propaganda, to target individuals in our own country, and to urge them to attack us on our own soil.

In March of this year, the New York Times reported that ISIS's use of social media, including Twitter and high-quality online recruiting videos, has been ``astonishingly successful,'' and the speed at which modern social media moves means America must move faster.

In fact, we read about the recently foiled terrorist attack in Boston, where Islamic extremists planned to behead law enforcement officials. It shows us the importance of engaging these online terrorists, their propaganda machines, interpreting their encrypted communications, and cracking down on the spread of online terrorist networks--but how can we fight back against these cyber threats from abroad when our own government officials show themselves to be woefully incompetent?

We in this country spent months debating the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' metadata, and in the meantime, while we are having this debate, Chinese hackers stole millions of Americans' personal information. In fact, it is estimated now those Chinese hackers broke into the Office of Personnel Management--basically the HR system of the Federal Government--and stole over 20 million records of employees of the Federal Government.

This recent breach of Federal employees' information may possibly be rooted in a phishing email. In fact, in a recent article in Ars Technica on June 8, they said:

It may be some time before the extent of the breach is known with any level of certainty. What is known is that a malware package--likely delivered via an e-mail ``phishing'' attack against OPM or Interior employees--managed to install itself within the OPM's IT systems and establish a back-door for further attacks. The attackers then escalated their privileges on OPM's systems to the point where they had access to a wide swath of the agency's systems.

These hackers broke into the computers at the Federal Government's Office of Personnel Management. They were downloading the very forms Federal employees use to gain national security clearances.

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