There was a time — about a half-dozen years ago — when the then-speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, John Boehner, R-Ohio, called on my congressman, Clarendon Republican Mac Thornberry, to head up a cyber-security task force in Congress.
If memory serves, Boehner tasked Thornberry with finding ways to improve our cyber network protection against the kind of things that have been happening of late: hackersĀ seeking to disrupt the U.S. electoral process. Those pesky Russians have been fingered as the major culprits in this cyber issue; President Obama has ordered a full review of what we’ve learned; Donald J. Trump has dismissed the CIA analysis as “ridiculous.”
So, where is the one-time GOP cyber-security expert on all of this? He should be a major participant in the public discussion. I haven’t seen or heard a thing from the veteran GOP lawmaker since the Russian hacking story hit the fan.
I checked Thornberry’s website to look for a statement from the congressman about what he thinks regarding this matter. I didn’t find anything. I looked at the link titled “Press Releases” and came up empty; I went through the “Issues” link, nothing there, either. I scanned the list of Thornberry’s essays on this and that and couldn’t find a commentary about recent events relating to cyber security.
Here’s the link to his website. Take a look.
Thornberry is a busy man, now that he’s chairing the House Armed Services Committee. He’s not superhuman.
However, Speaker Boehner gave Thornberry a big responsibility to craft a cyber-security policy that — one could surmise — was supposed to protect our secrets against foreign agents’ snooping eyes.
I’m wondering about the status of whatever it was that my congressman delivered to the speaker and whether any of his recommendations will become part of the cyber-security solution.