Sen. Bob Corker delivered the keynote speech at a law enforcement conference in Chattanooga Tuesday, reports the Times Free Press.
He told the officers they are his heroes while talking about cyberattacks and intellectual theft and got in some name-dropping — “citing his recent conversations with China’s President Xi Jinping and Apple CEO Tim Cook,” for example.
The chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations, Corker is an advocate of the National Security Agency and an outspoken critic of the agency’s former contractor Edward Snowden, who came to fame for publicizing proprietary information about the NSA that caused Americans to question government mass- surveillance techniques.
Corker cited the recent cybertheft of information from more than 21 million former and current government employees from the Office of Personnel Management, which came to light this summer as a national instance of the challenges police may be dealing with on a local level.
“Many of you have been involved in the military, many of you have been involved in intelligence in the past, and all of you know that’s just what governments do to each other, right?,” Corker said. “I could go further, but I won’t in this setting.
“But the fact is, what matters most is what’s happening at the individual level. That’s absolute theft. You can steal people’s personal property. Ya’ll are dealing with it at all kinds of levels, and more and more [frequently].”
Corker cited recently implemented laws that allow the wiretapping of human trafficking suspects as a step in the right direction for law enforcement.