on c-span.org. c-span history series returns next month with a look at 12 the supreme court cases. with constitutional issues and a personal story behind significant supreme court decisions.beginning monday, february 26 live at 9 pm eastern. and to help you better understand each case we have a companion guide written by veteran supreme court journalist. this book costs $8.99 plus shipping and handling. to get your copy go to c-span.org/landmark cases. quick legislators regulators and tax executives attended internet policy conference in washington earlier today. it was hosted by the internet education foundation over the next 2 and a half hours, we will learn about cybersecurity online advertising, digital

innovation and more. [inaudible conversations] welcome everybody. welcome. hello, welcome, everybody. welcome to the 14th annual state of the net conference. thank you for coming. some have been here for 14 years in a row and i really appreciate. a lot of you have been here for a number of years. i think you as well. this year has been an interesting year. not only national affairs, but also in internet policy. it has been a really interesting convulsive, different year. a lot of things have changed.

we are really excited. when put together a great group of speakers that will be here to talk about a lot of those changes that have happened to us in internet policy in the last year. also scope out what we think this year will look like. that is kind of the point of state of the neck. in january. my name is tim and i'm the executive director of the organization founded by jerry berman who was over here. you will hear from him at lunch who founded the organization and found the concept. [applause] jerry is a giant and we are happy to have him back. he will be introducing in the program so you will hear from him. normally it snows before this and we are expecting snow tomorrow. i am thrilled about that and the people that can organize a state of the union can deal with that. today we have good weather and we are thrilled to have a great lineup of speakers. really quickly i would like to thank our sponsors.

you can see some of them on the screens around you. include comcast, universal, facebook, we have verizon, they will be rotating throughout the day so we want to thank them. we also want to thank folks at c-span that showed up to live stream this on their channel here we are thrilled to have a lot of people tuning into this. the # four today if you like to join is #sotn. this is the 14th annual and we did a walk-through with the security team with some speakers last week. and this is the 14th annual. i said yes time we started in 2006. he said, what did you talk about in internet policy in 2006? and i had to think. it was before the iphone and a

lot of issues we are grappling with today. it has been so much fun to be involved in these issues and so excited. i get up every day and i'm thrilled to be part of it. let's get going.we have an agenda in your bag. we will be moving a lot but bear with us as we shuffle around. for the first speaker today, let me introduce senator klobuchar. this is an interesting year in internet policy. she is really kind of rising as far as tackling some of the toughest issues we are dealing with an internet policy and democracy and freedom of expression. when thrilled to have her with us today. she's a sponsor of the honest act and is a leader on these issues and we expect to hear a lot more from her. let me welcome to the stage, senator klobuchar.

[applause] x thank you everyone. i heard the discussion of the weather. when you're from minnesota, you get going. i will note that about one month ago it was 38 below without the windchill. in minnesota and a few years ago, it was colder in minnesota than it was on mars for one day. you can google that, it happened. the range rover was in a warm part of mars and we scored colder. now all of those people are coming for the super bowl next weekend. and i talked to someone from the staff in minnesota and i said we are ready to do the dog sledding and we are doing skiing in all of this. and they said senator it will be a little cold. so watch out for this. i am very excited to speak here. and you know that tomorrow night we are going to hear the state of the union. i am just as excited to get my first date of the net.

i think there will be a few differences in our speeches. i'm very excited to be on c-span3. i think there will be differences in terms of some focuses that i have and i think that we need to be talking about as a country. and i want to thank the internet education foundation and all of the groups that made this really important conference possible. while i am not focusing on these issues my speech, i was asked to talk about some security issues. you know there are major issues of net neutrality we are dealing with. and there are also big issues with broadband. i may state that has a lot of rural areas and i'm one of the founders of the rural broadband caucus in the senate. we even have our own logo which is unique. and we have bipartisan group.

i was disappointed that we were not able to take some of that overseas money and put it into infrastructure which would have included rural broadband but we will live to fight another day. i think between the universal service fund and some of the other ways that we can find funding we really have to up our game. ... flight recorder and first computer so i would say --

#yourewelcome. this continues to be a major part of our economy. we have the fortune 500 companies and thriving businesses which is a big part of it as well and so in that way, but intranet has been important to me tha me into then i got involved in this, there's a few reasons i did the first is that i am the daughter of a reporter. my dad is now 90-years-old or will be next month. i started with the ap and in 1960 there were three states out, illinois, minnesota, california and he knew how northern minnesota would vote and he called it and said i have

two words for you in minnesota and he literally interviewed everyone from ginger rogers to the famous coach to ronald reagan, so that is deep and mighty roots of the free press and information so that is what brings me to this issue at my core. the second reason i'm so interested in this is that i spent eight years as the lead prosecutor at about a quarter of the state's population and i did a lot with white collar and making sure we have an even playing field when it came to criminal enforcement and i say that's not to scare everyone that you make the case it didn't matter if someone committed a crime with a crowbar or with a

computer it's still a crime and those walls have to be as sophisticated as those that are breaking them which of course applies to the intellectual property theft and what we are seeing across the world right now with the interference in our elections and the third way that i come at this issue, i've i've campaign didn't run for office and most importantly i run from the position of not having personal wealth, so in my first race i was outspent like 3-1 and i remember i could only run where at the time no one had cable. mike cohen and was running them way before they were running computer adds.

we had such little money so we were looking for ways that would be cheap so i remember someone called in and it was a very close race and got called in to the radio stations. amy klobuchar has ads on constantly and he said yo to jut listen to espn? [laughter] i ended up winning by nine votes per precinct in this county which was two congressional districts and i did it not only that way but by putting up the 3,000 lawn signs and giving 85 pancake breakfasts. if i had done 70 i would have lost. there is a reason for this and i have a firm belief in the

grassroots politics in the playing field and in the senate it was even more pronounced because they were running against a sitting congressman for the senate and i never raised more than $5 per person so suddenly i was calling everyone and no one would returned my call and i finally gave up it is a true story and i used my own personal at the time rolodex 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 ex-boyfriend. [laughter] as my husband has pointed out is not an expanding base. [laughter] why did this matter, because i am obsessed with having fairness in campaigns. i hated the citizens united decision and i didn't like all of the dark money behind the

scenes i wanted transparency. the final reason and i will get to what i'm talking about is because i'm from minnesota and we ha have the highest voting turnout in the country and we tend to like fairness and transparency, some of it as our scandinavian tradition. so, when you see that kind of shenanigans that is basically fraud and criminal activity influencing elections you have a problem on your hands and if we want to guarantee the right we have to do something about this and i kind of put it into prongs. senator langford and i have a bill with senator harris and lindsey graham which is focused on putting about $400 million we

find a way to pay for it with leftover grant money into the state infrastructure and you look at how much money that is, it is 3% of one aircraft carri carrier. so, when we are spending this much money on our national defense, the fact that we are being outspent and outdone on the internet and it comes to protecting our democracy in this country that is developed. so that is a problem and that is why i think as we look at our own national security priority's we have to start seeing the infrastructure as a major part of that. so what is happening according to our own department of homeland security, russians attempted to hack at least 21 stat21states systems in 2016. they also launched a cyber

attacks against the software company and have the e-mails of more than 100 local election officials. last september the chicago board of elections reported that the birth dates and other sensitive information of tens of thousands of registered voters that were exposed. but they didn't just try to hack into the system as you all know. they also launched an extended and sophisticated information designed for the country and to destroy americans confidence in our political system and sort of as a kind of perfect round as we go into this year which has been a rather tumultuous year, by the way almost exactly a year ago on the inaugural stage i was replaced as the most famous american in washington by milani athelonnie at trump, it is very difficult. she was born an hour away from where my relatives are from and

as i said the other day every time i look at her it is like looking in the mirror. [laughter] with john and lindsey graham and the troops in the middle of the night on new year's eve. but there we were. we also visited lithuania and georgia. the foreign relations just a report out on this which is no surprise based on what we have heard that they have seen this movie before. they get mad at estonia and so what do they do, they cut off their intranet simply because they moved the statute of a

soldier from a public square to a cemetery where the other statutes like that were. and one of the countries when they are having the 25th their h anniversary of independence, they invite some of the ukrainian parliamentarians are in exile and invites that to this operation and then they cut off the internet, russia gets mad at the parliamentarians from the country. this kind of stuff has been going on for a long time. the best example i had as we heard directly when we were in munich a few months ago from the norwegian prime minister that told us this directly that they were mad because they had been building up their military and running some fake as. the economy was completely tanking and they were running out of fruits and vegetables in

the entire country of norway so as a result, all of them but have seen it on their own russian tv were coming and arriving in norway to see their friends and relatives with bags and bags of fruits and vegetables and i loved that story because it isn't just a political entry story it can hit people directly as they try to understand what this fake news is about. i go back to that story and remember the time with that blizzard coming at us to show our american might to the russians and put him directly. he's got machine guns, he gave me two daggers but that is a whole another story. but what we had to stand up to show is that we are a beacon of democracy because we have a free and fair election and we know how to handle this.

what we have learned since is that we didn't really know how to handle it. it wasn't just the hacking which turned out to be way too long to tell about it was also the very absence of the american political campaign which is how you communicate. at least when you put the ads out you have to have disclaimers and disclosures in so what do we find out? russia spent at least $100,000 on facebook add to influence the 2016 election. we know that the disinformation reached more than 126 million americans and we know that russia has a factory that employs nearly 1,000 agents many of whom worked 12 hour shifts that are expected to make hundreds of comments on social media that are intentionally divisive and all of it is

bankrolled by president putin. we know there's a lot of fake stuff out there in america. fake tans, sewing, storylines on tv. we can deal with some of those fake things but when you have people in our own state that don't know they are fake things that is a whole another thing when you deal with these fake political ads like the ones we show that the judiciary hearing that directed people to text their votes in. that happened in america. we have those ads that were put out on social media over and over again that says don't deal with the lies just text your vote for hillary, here is the number. that is criminal if we could have caught the people that did that because that's a direct interference with the election. former director of national intelligence james clapper testified last year that russia

will continue to interfere in the political system. he said i believe russia is now emboldened to continue such activities in the future both here and around the world and to do that even the more intensely so that the next is 281 days a week from today and that is why james langford and i are working so hard to try to get that funding allocated for that is the first bill i want to mention. 386 million for election security but also requires information to go to the state election officials said there are certain people in each state that would have security clearance to proceed that information. do you know the issues about the 221 states my state didn't find out about it until it went public that they tried to hack into the state. i've been talking about this issue for months. in the case of illinois and mentioned they got into other

voter security. we have support from the bill from the freedom caucus and in the house they are carrying a similar version, the identical bill to fund the debt is a little bit different than the one senator langford and i have and both are aimed at this because there is concern on the left and on the right that if you have a hack somewhere in the states thaandstates that haven'd their infrastructure equipment in the past decade you think russia doesn't know that? they do. so when you have that going on in something like ten or 12 states that don't even have backup paper ballots so there's no way to audit it afterwards so what the bill does that says let's get the money out to the states and make sure the information is shared through

amanda security and make sure it is auditing so if something does go wrong you have a way to prove it. minnesota has had a lot of recounts in close elections and the way you do that of course when you are trying to check out a close election or some kind of fraud is by having backup paper ballots. so those are the components of the bill and something we would like to get done. second, and this is the bill i was mentioning. we had something of some kind n hearing that went on and the facts we know r. 1.4 billion was spent on online ads in 2016 can nearly eight times the amount spent in 2012. everyone agrees the trend will continue whether it is up to 3 billion or 4 billion, we don't know that in 2018 but those are the kind of projections that there's going to be migration of

campaign money over to the social media signs. a poll found that 65% of americans using the internet for election related information, online platforms like broadcast, sabroadcastof a satanic cable ad satellite that has over 210 million american users who are cable providers with subscribers so that is why when we look at the law they were all designed back at the time that it was print and radio and tv so that's why we want to upgrade and what the honest ad is about but i introduced to senator mccain and senator warner. it's creating this even playing fueled sending a message to us to russia that all the countries across the world.

this isn't like sharing a cat video resource coworker. of course it doesn't get to some of these other things and that is the paid political ad. so that's why i ask you to look at this bill. bill. i know facebook, twitter and google have taken some measures to upgrade their policies and have called this out as a problem from back in the last election but the only way this will work is if you apply it across the board so it isn't just one company doing one thing and another company taking this measure. i ask some of the hearings and they say this would be difficult to follow this kind of law.

remember what it says now for print radio tv it says if you have a candidate ad that some say they will put disclosures on or if you have an aunt of national legislative importance, then you have to have the disclaimer prepared and paid for but you also have to have the disclosure so that means the candidates, opponents and the press are going to see that these ads are. they can't just pop up on a facebook page for one day or an hour and then goes away so no one ever knows they existed. the answer we got is that will be hard to figure out. my a radio station in minnesota can figure it out. they have to keep them in a file and put it online and i believe the greatest country america should figure it out just like the radio stations and the minneapolis star tribune, just

like the network tv or cable tv. they are able to figure out what those ads are. get a lawyer's opinion and then they know what the ads are. that is the same thing we have to do for the paid political ads on the internet. it's one step towards protecting the elections and i am hopeful people will see the light and will be able to get it done. i will close with a reminder of what is at stake in the fight we cannot wait to act. in 1923, many years before the internet, even before sputnik aninto the race with russia to space for joseph stalin and the general secretary was asked about a vote i of the central committee of the party. ssolomon wasn't concerned about the vote. after all, he explained who voted was completely unimporta unimportant. what was important he said was

who would count the votes and how. it is now 95 years later and sometimes it seems like we are back at square one and now we have the russians again try being in my mind to influence votes by suppressing the votes and putting these ads out and also possibly counts the votes has been devoting infrastructure we bitterly have been trying to attack on both ends and we know they are not the only threat throughout the 21st century the adversaries will continue to use cyber warfare and we need to be prepared to defend their networks against these threats no matter where they come from. i make this case strongly despite everything that you hear nothing could be less partisan than securing the future of our elections.

it was marco rubio said during this last election, the next time you wil there will be anotr candidate and party. i kind of like quoting stalin and ben marco rubio. i thought he would enjoy that. and so, whether you are a four-star general, fourth grader or computer engineer at foursquare, this is an issue that unites all of us because protecting our democracy and allowing technology to four rush goes hand in hand. the freedom to speak and vote and participate freely is closely intertwined not just with who we are as americans in our heart that the daughter of a newspaper reporter it is also about how our economy works and how we innovate and move forward as a nation. this will be the true measure of the state of the internet this

year and the years to come is whether or not he can make sure yes it is available to all but also whether it continues to enhance the freedoms and not limit our freedoms so that is what i hope you think about when you hear all the presentations today that the internet has done so well for so long and should be used for truth and to shine a light and to ensure that the american people get more information, accurate information to choose their leaders and their government and their own future, so thank you very much. enjoy the event and i appreciate being able to launch you off today. [applause]