This post was written by Hatchet reporter Will Emmons.
If history has taught Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., anything about keeping the country safe, it’s that national security officials and Congress must expect the unexpected.
Lieberman compared the need to gear up for cybersecurity attacks to historically “big events” like Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Berlin Wall in a panel discussion Wednesday at Jack Morton Auditorium.
Lieberman, chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, is retiring in January, but said the country needed to stay on high alert for potential cybersecurity attacks.
“Our enemies will be continually altering their methods,” he said, adding that Congress needs to “create layers of homeland protection that simply didn’t exist before.”
Despite advocacy by top national security officials and President Barack Obama, a cybersecurity bill pushed by Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has failed earn Senate approval twice this year.
Lieberman criticized senators for failing to put aside partisan differences with the bill, which would urge companies that operate water plants and transportation networks to heighten their protection of computer systems.
Some Republican opponents say the bill would put needless restrictions on businesses.
“If you hold out for 100 percent of what you want on a big bill like this, you end up accomplishing nothing and the nation suffers,” Lieberman said at the panel hosted by GW’s Homeland Security Policy Institute and Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The legislative fight that Lieberman led to create the Department of Homeland Security holds lessons about compromise and bipartisanship, he said. In fighting to create that federal agency after 9/11, Lieberman and others had to make sacrifices on what they wanted included in the bill.
Otherwise, Lieberman said, the country would have been operating under the same system that failed to prevent terrorist attacks.
“The status quo had enabled the attacks of 9/11,” Lieberman said, adding that such attacks “were preventable if we had been more organized.”
Lieberman said the best way to ensure that the country stays safe in the future – in anticipating attacks that cannot yet be “imagined” – is to have a “constant oversight of Congress and constant internal mechanisms.”
GW has also doubled down on cybersecurity efforts, with the Office of the Vice President for Research starting a University-wide effort to ramp up research on the topic this year. The School of Engineering and Applied Science also started offering a master’s degree in cybersecurity this fall.
