Actually, Ben Sasse Has a Strong Record on Cyber Security Issues

On Twitter tonight, Sean Hannity praised Wikileaks for revealing how corrupt the United States government is. U.S. Senator Ben Sasse was quick to point out just how ill-advised praising a Russian intelligence front group is, which set Hannity off on a series of tweets about how Ben Sasse is responsible for our nation’s weak cyber security because Washington D.C. has done nothing to make it better.

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To Mr. Hannity, I would suggest even a cursory Google search of “Ben Sasse” and “cyber security” because there are several places one can go to see just how much Sasse has pushed to strengthen our nation’s cyber defense.

From July of last year, after the major hack of the Office of Personnel Management, Sasse wrote a column for Wired:

In the coming days, when OPM provides Congress more details about the hack, Director Katherine Archuleta may play the sacrificial lamb and lose her job. This will be a transparent attempt to con the public into thinking the problem is solved. At best, firings are consequences, not solutions.

What we need is a long-term, intelligence-driven strategy for safeguarding sensitive, personal information and for deterring future attacks.

And one for USA Today:

Instead, many are concerned that Washington has neglected cyber security for so long that we now find ourselves in a dangerous position. We know what we need to do — aggressively deter cyber attacks — but we are unable to do so because we are too vulnerable to those very threats.

Something big has to change.

We need to do a serious scrub of our cyber threat assessments, of our defensive posture against online attacks, and of our offensive cyber doctrine. We can’t be passive anymore. We can’t sit in silence and naively hope that we’ll somehow still manage to preserve our national interests or our way of life.

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And here he is on the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act:

A single piece of legislation will not solve the United States’ strategic cybersecurity challenges but I am pleased that this bill elevates our national conversation, makes incremental improvements, and sunsets in a responsible way. After today’s votes, we will still face the long-term challenges and uncertainty of this new era of cybersecurity. We must completely re-evaluate our entire cyber doctrine. There’s more work ahead.

There are few people in Washington D.C. as committed to revamping and improving our cyber security as Sasse is, and anyone with even a remote knowledge of Sasse’s work knows this. Hannity, however, seems to be ignorant of this (willfully or otherwise) and is only succeeding in defending a Russian intelligence group and justifying their actions every time he praises Wikileaks for their information dumps.

Only one of these two men is actually making the United States a safer place, and it isn’t Sean Hannity.

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