Last week was a sobering one for Congress.
The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump served as the backdrop, the vivid videos of the angry mob of Jan. 6 underscoring all that could have been lost that day, and all that divides Americans.
In the House committee rooms, meanwhile, lawmakers worked on a giant economic relief package as we head into the second year of a deadly, isolating, growth-killing pandemic.
And finally, in a room far from the central action of the week, a handful of government and private-sector professionals held forth before the House Homeland Security panel on one harder-to-define but no-less-real challenge to this democratic republic. The shorthand word for it is cybersecurity — but that term trivializes the issue, and the challenge.
Cyber makes it sound like it belongs only to the province of the computer savvy, the geeks, as if it is some secondary technical problem that has a permanent fix.
It is not. This is an issue of national security, and of national survival, these intelligence and technology professionals said. The growth of the internet worldwide combined with the power of mass online messaging through social media, and available-to-all hacking tools, means that the United States is under constant, unrelenting attack from adversaries, foreign and domestic.
The attacks do not cease, will not cease and will be a permanent problem, like human disease, about which Americans have to be constantly vigilant, and which may never be eradicated.
This is not about just computer systems going down or getting glitchy. A public water supply was attacked earlier this month in Florida, which if it had not been foiled quickly could have sickened tens of thousands of people. The recent and ongoing SolarWinds hack, by Russian intelligence operatives, will be with us for years and is still only partially understood. It affects and will affect hundreds of top U.S. companies and many agencies of the federal government.