or d.h.s. or energy or treasury was perfectly good at responding to your run of the mill cyber intrusions that unfortunately have become way too common but those could be handled with existing agency machinery and procedures. but where we needed additional help, where we needed an additional framework put in place, where those incidents that could not be handled through normal means, those incidents that exceeded the capacity of any single agency to deal with under their normal resources and normal sort of standard operating procedures. and so those we defined as significant cyber incidents. those that are going to pose a measurable threat to our national security, our foreign policy, our public health and safety, public confidence, all of those things. to organize our thinking in that space and to make that a little bit clearer, we developed a cyber security severity schemea for sort of measuring caltgriesing incidents that constitute those threats. and we actually published that severity sche

so the electoral, the voting system is not now considered by the d.h.s. as critical infrastructure. so i think one of the things the obama administration will be doing, as david said, is sending a signal that we're going to consider critical infrastructures including the voting system and there is a line there. >> rose: you will say to the russians, stop this because you know what we can do. >> i think we'll send a signal that there are certain behaviors that will be outside and there will be repercussions. >> what would be the repercussions. >> i think most of them we're not going to see. i think probably we're already engaged in some disruption of cyber operations in russia, so are we disrupting whatever the russian spies are doing themselves? are we sending signals to russian leaders through our own cyberoperations that we could respond if we need to? i think given all of the other interests we have with the russians now in syria, the iran nuclear deal, i think we're very unlikely to use sanctions or other more punitive measurers. >> it might be worth noting they may have played

didn't the white house put out a basic strategy and the d.h.s. has been examining those issues too. not just e.m.p. attacks but also large scale solar flairs, right? like the one that happened in 1896 that could devastate power grids and stuff like that. i don't think there's any simple solution. sherrill: everybody has resiliency, redundancy. all those types of solutions. for the critical -- i think across the entire government, we've identified what we consider our critical infrastructure. those are the things that we're looking at and we make sure we can protect. frank: back there. questioner: first i'd like to say that i appreciate everything you do and i'm very impressed that the two of you have a position that have given couldn't nuent to the don't -- continuity to the development of security to the agency you represent. the question i have is about the first topic you presented on that letter that was sent to the 20 something million people. i'm one of them that received the letter. i think more than one. i think it was mailed several times. which i thought it was a little bi