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Sen. Mark Warner

WASHINGTON: Congress has failed to pass even basic protections against Russian disinformation, Chinese spyware, and other high-tech threats, warns the Democratic Vice-Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee – one of the few lawmakers with first-hand experience in the tech sector himself.

“I’m very concerned, on a host of areas, that we’ve not done enough,” Sen. Mark Warner told the Billington Cybersecurity Summit this morning. On election security in particular, “we as the Congress have not legislated any guardrails, and I think that leaves us vulnerable,” he said. With the vote less than two months away amidst a pandemic, a recession, and racial turmoil, he said, “I’m very, very concerned in these last 50-plus days [that] Russia could try to exacerbate those kind of racial divisions” as they did in 2016.

While the moderate Democrat didn’t call out any fellow legislators by name (and barely mentioned President Trump), he made clear he blames Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the inaction on the elections.

What progress there has been, Warner said, is attributable to the social media companies slowly waking up and to the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) improving coordination amongst federal agencies. Meanwhile Congress has failed even to hold votes on such “low-hanging fruit” as requiring people to report attempted foreign interference to the FBI or mandating the same disclosure requirements for online ads that already exist for TV.

“The good news is, we have made improvements since 2016,” Warner said. “The social media companies are doing a slightly better job. They’re still reactive, but at least they’re aware of the manipulation and misrepresentation that takes place on their platforms…DHS CISA in particular, [has] done a pretty good job of improving the overall security of our election machinery and I think they’ve gotten most election officials recognizing that this is a threat.”

“The bad news…we have not passed a single piece of legislation,” he said. “Even though there’s been a great deal of bipartisan legislation proposed, the majority leader has not let any of these bills come to the floor.”

via Wikimedia Commons

Huawei HQ in Shenzhen, China

The election is the most immediate issue worrying Warner, but it is far from the only one. He’s also deeply concerned about high-tech competition with China, where he also believes the US is badly lagging.

Despite President Trump’s effort to ban 5G giant Huawei from the US market, many American businesses — especially smaller, rural telecommunications companies – still rely on Huawei and other low-cost Chinese tech, he said, much of it rife with backdoors that could be exploited by hackers. Warner co-authored legislation with Republican Sen. Roger Wicker to help root out that tech, a form of which did pass last year.

But the US must do much more do secure its IT infrastructure, especially as cheap devices connected to the Internet of Things dramatically increase the potential vulnerabilities an adversary could attack. “The idea that we would roll out all these sensors and devices without … some minimum security standards, it’s pretty crazy to me,” Warner said. “We’re making a huge error by not getting ahead of this and putting in standards, and so far from the legislative side and frankly from the NIST [National Institute of Standards & Technology] side, I don’t think we’ve been forward-leaning enough.”

Ultimately, Warner argued, the US government must make a major investment in the nation’s tech sector to provide homegrown equipment that is secure. “We don’t even have a competitor” to Huawei in the US, he lamented, citing Finland’s Nokia and South Korea’s Samsung as its main Western rivals.

“I do think there is a growing bipartisan recognition that we’re going to have to do more public-private partnership,” Warner said. “I’ve partnered with my friend [Republican Sen.] John Cornyn, and we have a major initiative that in previous years would have been dismissed as industrial policy [in the past], making major government investment in our chip industry, in our semiconductor business… We’re talking about literally tens of billions of dollars.”

“Industrial policy” has long been a dirty word in Washington, especially among Republicans who see it as government meddling with the private sector that’s bound to backfire. But the Chinese threat has at least some in the GOP willing to reconsider.

“Those of us on the conservative side of the aisle …are going to have to get little bit outside of our normal comfort zone,” Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher told the Billington conference yesterday. “We’re going to have to have some form of industrial strategy when it comes particularly to 5G technology.”