Preparedness response and communications will come to order. The subcommittee is meeting today to receive testimony on the state of First Responder communications. I now recognize myself for an Opening Statement. I want to welcome all witnesses here this morning on an issue that is vital to our Homeland Security. The ability of our First Responders to communicate. As noted in the 2006 national interoperable baseline survey, there is a, quote, direct correlation between effective communications, interoperatedability and First Responders ability to save lives, end quote. In my hometown of new york city we know this all too well. Both the first both the office of Emergency Communications and First Responder Network Authority were established in the wake of the communication failures of 9 11 and later in hurricane katrina. We have made a great deal of progress since those fateful disasters. States and localities have invested billions of dollars in their Communications Networks, including
Well, good morning. We meet in organization to protect our nation in cyber space. To begin i would like to thank senators rounds and nelson for their leadership on these issues in our Cyber Security Sub Committee. This hearing builds upon the good work they and their Sub Committee have done to tackle the critical challenge of cyber. This is a that is growing more dire and more complex. Not a week passes that we dont read about some disturbing new incident. This is a totally new kind of threat as we all know. Our adversaries state and nonstate actors view the entire information domain as a battle space and across it they are waging a new kind of war against us, the war involving what extending beyond our military to include our businesses and our people. The department of defense has a Critical Role to play in this new kind of war but it cant succeed alone. To be clear we are not succeeding. We have lacked pollties in the cyber domain and we still dochlt it is because we were trying to
Gregory Touhill, former federal chief information security officer and deputy assistant Homeland Security secretary for cyber security operations, seen here at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in 2015 in Washington, DC. Touhill was named director of Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT in April. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
On April 21, Gregory Touhill was named as the new director of the Computer Emergency Readiness Team at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a non-profit, federally funded research center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania that partners with stakeholders in government, industry and academia to study and improve the cybersecurity ecosystem.
Touhill brings a rich and diverse background to the role, having spent years protecting military computer networks as an Air Force brigadier general and later serving as director of the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integrations Center at the Department of Homeland Security. He was the