In the old economy, if one plant that may have made widgets went down, that was a very traumatic event and difficult event for that company, its employees, and possibly the customers. But the impact in this new economy, where network failure can bring down all phone service or all the communications or all e-commerce in a region, is just enormous to the region and to our nation. Sixty percent of the world's Internet assets are here in the United States. We are the most dependent country on Earth for information technology, and this is the first time in American history that the federal government alone cannot protect our infrastructure. We can't hire a police force that's big enough to protect all of industry's information assets, nor would we want to hire that size police force.
Government obviously has a most vital role to play to protect our own computer networks.
The President has proposed to Congress a sixteen percent increase in funding for computer security issues. This will bring the amount that the government spends to over two billion dollars, and this is mostly to protect our computer networks. But the federal government systems, as we all know, are a small part of our country's infrastructure. The bulk is in the hands of you in the private sector. And the responsibility to protect them rests with you.