Thank you as well to all of our witnesses. I would venture to say that everyone in this room would be disturbed, but no one would be shocked by such a headline. In 1993, there were 13 non-government sites on the World Wide Web.
Today there are fourteen million.
And as the Web has mushroomed, Internet crime has quickly and quietly become a clear and present danger to our national security, our economy and all of our lives. Two years later that number almost tripled. Second, hacking is still considered more of a prank than a crime, even though hacking could cost lives or billions of dollars to the economy. Third, our laws even our computer laws are set up for a world that travels at subsonic speed while hacking crimes and computer viruses move at the speed of light. We have fallible systems vulnerable to hackers who are viewed with bemusement and laws that make it difficult to apprehend them.