Whos international mep ship is working to improve the security condition worldwide. We start by reviewing some successful bott net take downs in recent years. They may prove instructive as they are successes. In 2008, the conflict worm was discovered. I had competing commercials security companies. Members cooperated with each other to mitigate this global threat. Then in 2011, the u. S. Department of justice led operation ghost click, in which a criminal gang in estonia was arrested, charged with wire fraud and conspiracy. While shutting off the criminal infrastructure the victims depended on. My employer was the courtappointed receiver for the criminals Internet Connectivity and resources. I personally prepared, installed and operated the replacement servers necessary for that takedown. In each of these examples, we seed an ad hoc Public Private partnership in which trust was established and sensety information, including Strategic Planning was shared without any contractual framewor
Second, this is how criminals work with other criminals. We would not get far by trying to solve these fast evolving global problems with topdown control or through government directives and rules. As you yourself pointed out, a botnet is literally a network of robots, whereby robot we mean a computer thats been captured and made to run software neither provided by the maker or authorized or installed by its owner. It has conflict and so forth. The only hard and fast requirement for any of this software is interoperability, meaning it merely has to work. The cost of the internets spectacular growth d. Sorry the cost is much of the software we run was not adequately tested. The challenge for the internet is perhaps theres more assurance that an ul listed toaster will not burn our house, whereas some of our devices are insulated from becoming a tool of online criminals. These are Consumer Devices in a competitive and fastmoving market. Time to market is often the distance between success
Partisan issue. Plenty of democrats understand that the president s action has made it significantly harder for us to get off on the right foot in the new year on a number of issues that we already agree on, by and large. The junior senator from north dakota said the immigration order quote could poison any hope of compromise or bipartisanship in the new senate before its even started. Well, i agree with the sentiment. I hope shes wrong and i hope we can prove that wrong by saying that were not going to give up and were not going to let what the president does determine what we do. We have to do our job and we have to function and then were going to have to work with the president hopefully to try to move the country forward in a number of these areas. So i hope we can find a way to stop the president from acting on his own and to recommit ourselves to the rule of law and the particularl particularly the constitution and get about the job of addressing our countrys biggest challenges.
I want to start by noting that the committee has been particularly supportive as the staff and the oversight investigation subcommittee for their work on this issue and their work with our agency we consider it to be a Real Partnership and we are very grateful for this committees support. We have received a number of referrals from this committee and we appreciate your confidence and ability to work with the employees that your office refers. So thats one thing. Its already happening. We are doing everything that we possibly can. Weve set up a priority system and we free allocated staff to handle the va employee claims. But as the numbers increase its a very hard to keep up. We were at capacity before. In the retaliation cases now it exceeds 130, and the number as i mentioned continues to increase pretty much daily. We are an agency that has 120 employees more or less. We have jurisdiction for the statute for the reemployment rights act and we are working now on a demonstration for the
The foreign intelligence context, could we be running up against constitutional problems . Yes, absolutely. There are many constitutional issues implicated here. There is obtaining content of peoples communications, which is obviously going to raise Fourth Amendment questions. There is the reasonableness requirement and how that would apply in a National Security setting. And there are not only the rights of u. S. Persons communicating with other u. S. Persons, which has been the primary focus in the statue so far, but there are also constitutional issues raised when a u. S. Person is communicating with a nonus person. Half of that medication is constitutionally protected, of that communication is constitutionally protected, but has not received that kind of attention at all. There are many issues at play. Thank you very much to all of the witnesses. Thanks to the witnesses on this panel and to all of the witnesses on the board that made this possible. You can see the comments related