Earlier today senator amy, chart address and Internet Security conference and talked about how terrorist groups use the internet in russian interference in elections here and abroad. Will show you as much as we can until the conference resumes live at noon eastern. Thank you everyone. I heard the discussion of the weather and when you are from minnesota your ears, you know, you get going. I will note that about a month ago it was 38 below zero without winchell in minnesota and that a few years ago it was colder in minnesota than it was on mars for one day. You can google it. It happens. The range rover was in a warm part of mars and we scold quarter and now those people are coming to the super bowl next week. I talked to someone from our staff in minnesota and i said we are already to do the dogsledding and were gonna do the ski thing and were gonna do all this and he said senator, it will be cold. So, watch out for this. I am very excited to speak here and you know that tonight you will hear the state of the union but i am just as excited to give my first state of the net. I think there will be a few differences in our speeches so im excited to be on cspan3. We wont try to compete in that way. I also think there may be some differences in terms of the focus that i have in that i think we need to be talking about as a country. I want to thank the Internet Education Foundation and all the groups that made this really important conference possible. I am not focusing on these issues in my speech but i was asked to talk about some of our security issues. You know there are major issues of Net Neutrality that we are dealing with right now and there are also big issues with broadband. Im in a state that is a lot of rural areas and i am one of the founders of our real broadband caucus in the senate and we even have our own local that is unique. Weve got a goodbye partisan group and i was disappointed that we werent able to take some of that overseas money and put it into infrastructure which would have included Rural Broadband and all of broadband but we will live to fight another day and i think between the universal service fund and some of the other ways we can find funding we have two upper game because weve got farmers that are doing their business in the mcdonalds parking lot. My favorite story recently was an oncologist who goes to parking lot of a restaurant when he cant get to the hospital to do his work for his patients. We need to see some improvements. I will say in addition to being cold my state is focused on technology. We are the state that brought the world everything from the popup toaster to the pacemaker. We invented the black box flight recorder and even the first supercomputer. I would say you are welcome. We do a lot of things in the midwest the dont always get recognized in the tech area. That continues to be a major part we have fortune 500 companies and Small Businesses which is a big part of it as well. In that way, the internet has been important to me. The reason i got involved in some of this is i would say there were a few reasons that i did. The first is that i am the daughter of a reporter and my dad spent his whole career now nine years old or will be 90 next month and he started with the ap and in 1967 was one that helped the race for kennedy. They were three states out and he knew how northern minnesota, my relatives were all iron ore minors would vote and he called it in the guy in new york says i have three words, two words for you in minnesota, be right. And they were. He literally interviewed everyone from Ginger Rogers to mike degraff, he must go to the bears, to ronald reagan. That is deep in my roots and its a free press and free information and Accurate Information and that brings me to this issue at my core. To have the second reason is i spent eight years as we prosecutor and the county that has a quarter of our states population and i did a lot with white collar and making sure that we have an even Playing Field when it came to criminal enforcement and i say that not to scare everyone but more to make the case that i would look at things that it didnt matter if someone committed a crime with a crowbar or if they committed a crime with the computer. It is still a crime and that our laws have to be as sophisticated as those that are breaking them which of course applies to everything from intellectual property, to theft, to everything across the world with interference in our election. A third way, the selection is this issue and i was the about this on the car on the way over is that i have can paint and run for office must apparently ive run for office from a position of not having personal wealth. In my first race for this attorney job which is the chief prosecutor outspent three one, Something Like that, four one and i could only run at tivo which was at the time no one had cable so i remember the day of the election my opponent was running on network and this was before people were running computer love and i was the first candidate to have the newspaper website and a big deal at the time and there was so little money and people were looking at ways to be cheap and i was on cable and i saw some guy called and said it was a close race and the congressman sister was running and the guy called in to one of the radio stations and said that amy, she has as on constantly in the radio host said sir, you just listen to espn because that was the only black and white on ads on one thing. I knew that was like and i ended up winning by less than nine votes of precinct in this county which was to congressional districts. I did it and not only that way but by putting up 2000 lawn signs and being in 29 raise in doing 85 pancake breakfast. If i had done 70 i wouldve lost. I bring this up and theres reason for it and that is because i have a firm belief in grassroots politics and evening the Playing Field. When i iran for senate was more pronounced because i was running against a sitting congressman to the u. S. Senate and i have never raised more than 500 a person. I suddenly was calling everyone and no one return my calls because i couldnt say my name and they didnt know who i was and i finally gave up and said this is a very true story. I used my own personal rolodex remember when i had those and i called everyone i ever knew in my life and this is a twostory. I still have the record. I raised 17000 from ex boyfriends. [laughter] as my husband has pointed out it is not an expanding base. So, why does this matter . It matters because im upset with having fairness in campaigns. I hated the Citizens United decisions. Thats why i dont like the dark money behind the scenes. I want to have transparency and the final reason and i will get to what i want to talk about if you know where im coming from i am such a passion for this is because im from minnesota and we have the highest voting turnout in the country. We tend to no like fairness and transparency as some of our scandinavian tradition. When you see this kind of shenanigans and that minnesota nice word or basically fraud and basically criminal activity influencing elections you have a real problem on your hands. If you want to guarantee the right to free elections were going to have to do something about this. I put it in two prongs. One i will focus on today for the first is the election infrastructure in senator langford and i have a bill with senator harris and Lindsey Graham which is focused on putting 400 million and we found a way to pay for it with grant money into our state election infrastructure. That is 3 of one aircraft carrier. When we are spending this much money on a National Defense and the fact that we are being outspent and outdone on the internet when it comes to protecting our democracy in this greatest country that is developed all of these Incredible Technologies and the internet itself and that is a problem. I think as we look at our own National Security priority and we look at protecting our elections we have to start seeing our election infrastructure as a major part of that. What is happening is according to our own department of Homeland Security and our russians attempted to pack 21 states elective systems in 2016. Also launched Cyber Attacks against the Us Voting Software company and hacked the emails for more than 100 local Election Officials. Last september with the chicago board of election reported that names, addresses, birthdays and others information of tens of thousands of registered voters were exposed. They didnt just try to hack into our election system as you all know. They also launched an extended and sophisticated information were designed to divide our country and destroy american confidence in our political system. Sort of as a perfect round as we go into here which has been a tumultuous year, by the way, almost exactly one year ago on the inaugural stage i was replaced at the most famous living in in washington by melania a trumpet. It was difficult. She was born an hour away from where my relatives are from in slovenia and as i said, when i look at her is like looking in the mirror. In addition to that and that year my actual endoftheyear of 2016 was spent with john mccain, we are hoping in a difficult situation, with john and Lindsey Graham on the frontline of the ukrainian troops in the middle of the night on new years eve which [inaudible]. Wed also visited lithuania, latvia, estonia, georgia and what these countries have been dealing with for years formulations, democrats of the Foreign Relations committee did a report on this which was no surprise based on what we have heard they have seen this movie before. They get mad at estonia, rushed us, theres a big [inaudible] and the cut off their internet simply because they moved a statue of a russian soldier from a Public Square into a cemetery where the other statutes like that were. Or in one of the countries that would be latvia or lithuania when they are having their 25th anniversary of independence they invite some of the ukrainian parliamentarians who are in exile from mia in the invite that to the celebration and then they cut off the internet in russia gets mad of the parliamentarians from the country. This kind of stuff has been going on for a long time and the fake ads and the influence of election and the best example i have was we heard it directly when we were in munich a few months later from the norwegian minister told us this directly and that the russians had been mad at norway because they been building up their military so they been running fake ads and one of the fake ads is that norways economy was completely tanking and they were running out of fruits and vegetables in the entire country of norway. As a result all of these russians had seen it on their own russian tv were coming and arriving in norway to see their friends and relatives with bags and bags of fruits and vegetables. I love that story because it is not just a political intrigue story but it can hit people directly as he tried to understand what this fake news is really about. In the us and i go back to that story and i remember that time when that blizzard coming at us as we were standing there with the president to show our american law to the russians and to find a map directly and hes got machine guns to mccain and he gave lindsay a pistol and he gave me two daggers but thats a whole another story. What we had to stand up to show our american rights was we were protecting our internet and we are a beacon of democracy. We are a beacon of democracy because we are free and Fair Elections and we know how to handle. Will you learn sense is that he didnt really know how to handle it. Its not just the hacking which we have since learned which way too long to tell our state Election Officials about but it is also about the very essence of american Political Campaign which is how you communicate. You have to have an even Playing Field and thats what our laws are set up to do. This is when you put ads out you have disclaimers and exposure and what we find out . We find out that russia spent 100,000 in rubles on facebook ads to influence the 2016 auction. We know that the disinformation reached more than 126 million americans. We know that russia has a troll factory that employs nearly 1000 agents, many of whom worked 12 hour shifts and are expected to make hundreds of comments on social media that are intentionally divisive. All of it is fake and all of it is bankrolled by president vladimir putin. There is a lot of fake stuff out there. Big wrestling, take storylines on tv, we can deal with some of those vacant things but when you got people on our state that dont know that they are fake things that is a whole another thing