Transcripts For CSPAN2 Internet Policy Conference 20180129 :

Changes that have happened to us and our policy the last year and also kind of scope out what we think this year is going to look like and thats kind of the point. State of the net in january. My name is tim lorden and im part of organization sponsored by jerry who founded this organization, youll hear from at lunch and founded the concept much the state of the net and i want to thank jerry. [applause] jerry is a giant in the space and were happy to have him back. Hell be introducing the congressman later in the program and youll hear from him. Normally it snows before state of the net and were expecting snow tomorrow and ill thrilled about that and the people that can organize the state of the union can deal with that, but today, we have good weather and were thrilled to have a great lineup of speakers. Just really quickly, i want to thank our sponsors. You can see some of them on the screens around you. They include comcast nbc universal, we also have facebook, we have verizon and theyll be rotating throughout the day and thank the internet sponsor, the worldwide live stream for this as well and thanks to folks from cspan to live stream this on their channel. Were thrilled to have people kind of tuning into this. The hash tag today, its the twitter account. As far as the Conference Goes its our 14th annual and we did a walk through with the Security Team from some of the speakers last week, and the security, this is the 14th annual and i said yes. It started in 2006 and he said, what did you talk about in internet policy back in 2006 . And i had to think, you know, before the iphone and a lot of the issues that were grappling with today, but its been so much fun to be involved in these issues and so exciting. And things totally new and scary and im thrilled to be a part of it. But, lets get going. We have an agenda in your bag, so, it lists everything that we have. We have key notes. Well move from this room to room upstairs and back into this room and breakouts and back in this room. Bear with us as we scuffle around. And let me introduce our first speaker, senator Amy Klobuchar. She has a rising as far as tackling some of the toughest issues were dealing with internet policy and democracy and internet expression and were thrilled to have her with us today, shes the sponsor of the honest ads act in the United States senate and again, shes a leader on these issues and we expect to hear a lot more from her. Let me women to the stage, senator Amy Klobuchar. [applause] well, thank you, everyone, i heard the discussion of the weather and when youre from minnesota, you get going. I will note about a month ago, it was 38 below zero without wind chill in minnesota and that a few years ago, it was colder in minnesota than it was on mars for one day. You can google it. It happened. The range rover was in a cold a warm part of mars and we scored colder and now all of those people are coming for the super bowl next weekend. And i talked to someone from our staff in minnesota and go, were already ready to do the dog sledding and the ski thing, were going to do all this. He goes, senator, its going to be a little cold. So watch out for this. So, i am very excited to speak here and you know that tomorrow night were going to hear the state of the union, but im just as excited to give my first state of the net. And i think there will be a few differences in our speeches, so im very excited to be on cspan 3. So we wont try to compete in that way. But i also think there may be some differences in terms of some of the focuses that i have and that i think we need to be talking about as a country. And i want to thank the Internet Education Foundation and all the groups that made this really important conference possible. While im not focusing on the issues in my speech i was asked to talk about some of our security issues. You know, there are major issues of Net Neutrality that were dealing with right now and there are also big issues with broadband. Im in a state that has a lot of rural areas and im one of the founders of our Rural Broadband caucus in the senate. We even have our own logo, thats very unique in the senate and weve got a goodbye partisan group. I was disappointed we werent able to take some of that overseas money and put it into infrastructure, which would have included Rural Broadband and all broadband, but we will live to fight another day. And i think between the universal service fund and some of the other ways we can find funding, we really have to up our game because weve got, you know, farmers that are doing their business in the mcdonalds parking lot. My favorite story recently was an oncologist who goes to parking lot of a restaurant when he cant get to the hospital to do his work for his patients. So we need to see some improvement. I will say in addition to being cold, my state is really focused on technology. We are the state that brought the world everything from the popup toaster to the pacemaker. We invented the black box flight recorder and even the first super computer. So i would say, youre welcome. And so, we do a lot of things in the midwest that dont always get recognized in the tech area. Thats continued to be a major part of our economy. We have 17 fortune 500 companies, we have a lot of small thriving businesses, which is a big part of it as well. And so, in that way, the internet has been really important to me. And the reason i got involved in some of this, id say theres a few reasons that i did. The first is that i am the daughter of a reporter. My dad spent his whole career, hes now 90 years old or will be 90 next month. I started with the ap, and actually in 1960 was the one that called the race for kennedy. There were three states out, illinois, minnesota and california and he knew how northern minnesota, my relatives were all iron range, iron ore miners would vote and he called it and the guy from the ap said i have two words for you guys in minnesota, be right and they were. And so, he literally interviewed everyone from Ginger Rogers to mike ditka, the famous coach for the bears to ronald reagan. So thats deep in my roots, is free press and free information and Accurate Information. So, thats what brings me to this issue at my core. The second reason im so interested in this is that ive spent eight years as the lead prosecutor in a county about a quarter of our states population. And i did a lot with white collar and making sure that we have an even Playing Field when it came to criminal enforcement and i say that not to scare everyone, but more to make the case that i would look at things and it didnt matter if someone committed a crime with a crowbar or a crime with a computer. Its still a crime and that our laws have to be as sophisticated as those that are breaking them. Which, of course, applies to everything from intellectual property theft to what were seeing across the world right now with the interference in our elections. And the third way i come at this election, this issue, im thinking about this in the car on the way over, is that i campaigned, i have run for office and most importantly, i have run for office from a position are not having personal wealth. In moo i first race for the county attorney job, chief prosecutor, i was outspent three to one, Something Like that, four to one, i could only run ads on cable and no one hardly had cable. I remember the day of the election. My opponent was running it on tv ads. That was before computer ads. I was the first to put an ad on the newspaper website, a big deal at the time. Because we had so little money looking at ways that would be cheap and so, i was on cable and i remember some guy called in, a very close race, running against a congressmans sister, our republican congressmans sister and the guy called into one of the Radio Station, that Amy Klobuchar, she has ads op constantly. And he said, do you only listen to espn. I had black and white ads on one thing so i knew what that was like. I ended up winning by less than nine votes per precinct in this county, two congressional districts. I did it not only that way, but by putting up 3000 lawn signs, being in 29 parades, and doing 85 pancake breakfasts, okay . Like if id done 70, i would have lost. I bring this up, theres a reason for this and thats because i have a firm belief in grass roots politics and an even Playing Field and i ran for senate, it was even more pronounced because i was running against, again, a sitting congressman for the u. S. Senate, and i had never raised more than 500 per person. And so, i suddenly was calling everyone and no one would return my call, they couldnt say my name, didnt know who i was. I finally gave up, this is a very true story and i used my own personal at the time roledex, remember when we had those, and i called everyone i ever knew in my life and this is a true story, i still have the record, i raised 17,000 from exboyfriends. [laughte [laughter] as my husband has pointed out, its not an expanding base. Why does this matter . Well, it matters because im obsessed with having fairness in campaigns, thats why i hated the Citizens United decision. Thats why i dont like all of this dark money thats behind the scenes. I want to have transparency and the final reason and ill get to what i want to talk about so you know where im coming from, why i have such a passion for this, is because im from minnesota and we have the highest voting turnout in the country. And we tend to really like fairness and transparency and some of it is our scandanavian tradition and so when you see this kind of shenanigans and thats like a minnesota nice word for like basically fraud and basically criminal activity, influencing elections, you have a real problem on your hands. And if we want to guarantee the right for free elections, were going to have to do something about this. And i kind of put it in two prongs. One im going to more focus on today, but the first is the election infrastructure and senator langford and i have a bill along with senator harris and lindsey graham, focused on putting about 400 million we found a way to pay for it with leftover grant money into our state election infrastructure. And you look at how much money that is. Thats 3 of one aircraft carrier. Okay . And so, when we are spending this much money on our national defense, the fact that we are being outspent and outdone on the internet when it comes to protecting our democracy in this greatest country thats developed all of these Incredible Technologies and the internet itself, that is a problem. So thats why i think as we look at our own National Security priorities and we look at protecting our elections, we have to start seeing our election infrastructure as a major part of that. So, whats happening . Well, according to our own department of Homeland Security, russians attempted to hack at least 21 States Election systems in 2016. Russia also launched Cyber Attacks against the u. S. Voting Software Company and hacked the emails of more than 100 local Election Officials. And last september, the chicago board of elections reported that names, addresses, birth dates and other Sensitive Information of tens of thousands of registered voters were exposed. But they didnt just try to hack into our election system, as you all know. They also launched an extended and sophisticated information war designed to to divide our countries and americas political system. As sort of a perfect round as we go into this rather, which for me has been a rather tumultuous year for me. Almost a year ago on the inaugural stage i was replaced by the most slovenian melania trump. She was born an hour away from our relatives and as i say every time i look at her, its like looking in the mirror. [laughter] in addition to that and that year my actual end of the year of 2016 was spent with john mccain, were hoping, hope its very difficult situation, with john and lindsey graham, on the front line with the ukrainian troops in the middle of the night on new years eve. Which one do you kiss, but there we were and wed also visited lithuania, latvia, astona and georgia. And to hear the stories of what theyve been dealing with for years, democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee Just put out a report on this, which is no surprised based on what weve heard. And weve heard it before. They get mad at astona, russia does, and what do they do, they cut off their internet because they moved a statue of a russian soldier from a Public Square into a cemetery where the other statues like that were. Or in one of the countries that was either latvia or lithuania, when they are having their 25th anniversary of independence, so they invite some of the ukrainian parliamentarians who are of course in exile from crima, they invite that to the celebration and cut off the internet and russia gets mad of the parliamentarianions from that country. This kind of stuff has been going on for a long time. The fake ads. When we heard directly in munich a few months later, the Prime Minister told us that directly, that the russians had been mad at norway because theyve been building up their military and they ran fake ads. One of the fake ads, was that norways economy was tanking and they were running out of fruits and vegetables in the entire country of norway. As a result all of the these russians who had seen it on tv. Coming in norway with their relatives with bags and bags of fruits and vegetables. I love at that story, its not just a political intrigue story, it can hit people directly as they try to understand what this fake news is really about. So, in the u. S. , so i go back to that story and i remember that time with that blizzard coming at us as were standing there with president poroshenko to show our american might to the russians and to putin directly, and you know, hes got the machine guns he gives to mccain, he gave lindsey a pistol and gave me two daggers and thats a whole other story, we had to show up and show our american might, right . That were protecting our internet and a beacon of democracy because we have a free and Fair Election and we know how to handle this. What weve learned since we really didnt know how to handle it. It was not just the hacking, which we have since learned which took way too long to tell our state Election Officials about, but its also about the very essence of american political campaigns, which is how you communicate. Do you have an even Playing Field. Thats what all our laws are set up. But theyre not great because theres dark money going on, but when you put ads out, you have to have disclaimers and disclosures. Russia spent 100,000 in rubles on facebook ads to influence the 2016 election. We know that the disinformation reached more than 126 million americans. We know that russia has a troll factory that employs nearly 1,000 agents, many of whom who work 12 hour shifts and expect today make hundreds of comments on social media and make comments that are divisive, all of it fake, bank roled by president putin. We know theres a lot of fake things, fake tans, fake wrestling, fake tv, and when weve got something thats a whole other thing dealing with fake political ads. The ones we showed at the judiciary hearing that directed people to text their votes in, that happened in america. Right . We have those ads that were put out on social media over and over again, that said hey, dont deal with the lines, just text in your vote for hillary, here is the texting number. Thats criminal, thats criminal. If we could have caught the people that did that because thats a direct interference with the election. Former director of national intelligence, james clapper, testified last year that russia will continue to interfere in our political system. He said this, i believe russia is now emboldened to continue such activities in the future, both here and around the world, and to do it even more intensely. So that next election is 281 days away from today. And that is why James Langford and i are working so hard to try to get that funding out that, and so thats the first bill i want to mention to you guys. 386 million for election security. It also requires information to go to state Election Officials and so that there are certain people in each state that would have a security clearance so they could receive that information. Do you know that that issue about the 21 states, my state didnt find out until it went public that they had tried to hack into our state. I didnt know it. I have ben talking about this issue for months. We didnt know it and in the case of illinois, they got right into the voter security. We have support for this bill from the freedom caucus. Go figure, and in the house mark meadows is carrying a similar version, actually the identical bill to one that i had done with lindsey, that is the very its a little bit different than the one that senator langford and i have. And both those bills are named at this because theres concern on the left and on the right that if you have a hack somewhere, when you have dozens and dozens of states that havent updated their election infrastructure equipment in the past decade, do you think that russia doesnt know that . Well, they do know that. Im not disclosing some secret. When you have that going on and you have Something Like 10 or 12 states that dont even have backup paper ballots, right . So theres no way to audit it afterwards. What the bill does, lets get some money out to the states. Lets make sure the information is shared from Homeland Security and the third thing, lets have auditing so if something does go wrong, you have a way to prove it. Minnesota is unique, you have a lot of recounts and close elections and the way you do that, of course, when youre trying to check out a close election or if there have