The challenges posed by threats like terrorism, proliferation, and cyber attacks are not going away any time soon, and for our intelligence community to be effective over the long haul, we must maintain the trust of the American people and people around the world.
In our efforts to battle terrorism and cyber attacks and biological weapons, all of us must be extremely aggressive. We must protect our people from danger and keep America safe and free.
What we need to do is we need to create new international standards of behavior - not just national laws, because this is a global problem. We can't just fix it in the United States, because there are other countries that don't follow U.S. laws. We have to create international standards that say that cyber attacks should only ever occur when it is absolutely necessary.
Increasingly, we are seeing cyber attacks coming from states, organs of states. The most recent and troubling of these has been Russia.
There's no doubt now that Russia has used cyber attacks against all kinds of organizations in America, and I am deeply concerned about this.
The United States is more reliant on the technical systems. We're more reliant on the critical infrastructure of the internet than any other nation out there. And when there's such a low barrier to entering the domain of cyber-attacks we're starting a fight that we can't win.
Cyber attacks from foreign governments, especially China, Russia, North Korea along with non-state terrorist actors and organized criminal groups constitute one of our most critical national security concerns. They're leaning everything about us and we don't have - wanna have any servers in the basements, by the way folks.
I think what we are confronting now is a new war of ideas. It's not communism versus capitalism, but it is authoritarianism versus democracy and representative government. And that is a threat that here in Europe, they feel acutely. They've seen their countries interfered with, bombarded by cyber-attacks, by Russian propaganda, indeed, by Russian troops.
I have done business in China for 25 years, so I know that in order to get China to cooperate with us, we must first actually retaliate against their cyber-attacks so they know we're serious. We have to push back on their desire to control the trade route through the South China Sea through which flows $5 trillion worth of goods and services every year.
It ends a 40-year ban on exporting U.S. oil. It's changed - it's included in its cyber-security legislation - that says to private companies, hey, if you share with us your data on your cyber-attacks, your potential cyber-attacks, we'll give you liability protection. And they authorized a health care program for 9/11 responders for 75 years to cover the length of their lifespans.
The potential for the next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyber-attack.
Cyber attacks are not what makes the cool war cool. As a strategic matter, they do not differ fundamentally from older tools of espionage and sabotage.
What if someone hit us with an EMP, cyber-attack, and dirty bomb all at once? That would be pretty bad.
Businesses should be assured that law enforcement will operate with the utmost sensitivity toward victims of cyber attacks.
When people conceptualize a cyber-attack, they do tend to think about parts of the critical infrastructure like power plants, water supplies, and similar sort of heavy infrastructure, critical infrastructure areas. And they could be hit, as long as they're network connected, as long as they have some kind of systems that interact with them that could be manipulated from internet connection.
Although cyber attacks have caused billions of dollars in damage and affected the lives of millions, few if any can be characterised as acts of terrorism.
The bare bones tools for a cyber-attack are to identify a vulnerability in the system you want to gain access to or you want to subvert or you want to deny, destroy, or degrade, and then to exploit it, which means to send codes, deliver code to that system somehow and get that code to that vulnerability, to that crack in their wall, jam it in there, and then have it execute.
I think the public still isn't aware of the frequency with which the cyber-attacks, as they're being called in the press, are being used by governments around the world, not just the US.
In terms of my conversations with [Vladimir] Putin, these are conversations that took place before the election. As I indicated, there has been very clear proof that they have engaged in cyber attacks. This isn't new. It's not unique to Russia. There are a number of states where we've seen low-level cyber attacks and industrial espionage and, you know, other behavior that we think should be out of bounds.
People ask me all the time, 'What keeps you up at night?' And I say, 'Spicy People ask me all the time, 'What keeps you up at night?' And I say, 'Spicy Mexican food, weapons of mass destruction, and cyber attacks.'
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