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Hi, my name is Kirsten Todd, and I'm the managing director of the Cyber Readiness Institute.

One of the things that was both exhilarating and created some awareness for me was the power of people to make change at the state level.

And you know when I came to work in the federal government, I think what always

struck me as well, particularly when I was working on the hill, was that again,

it was the choices and the decisions of individuals that have impact.

I went up to the hill to work for Senator Lieberman as his economic policy advisor at the time.

And the Governmental Affairs Committee, you know, at the time was truthfully one of the more boring committees,

did post office naming, some appointments of positions that you're not really familiar with,

and it was this very interesting point of gut where you know on the on paper it didn't look

interesting to me and I had actually just been offered a job in the private sector on urban development

which I love but something in my gut said to take it.

And my first assignment for him was to do a hearing on critical infrastructure

protection that was scheduled for September 12, 2001. So 9-11 happened on that Tuesday, and we got on the phone, Senator Lieberman, his staff director,

and a couple of us who were working on the hearing, and he said, I want to go through with it.

And so we were the only hearing because we were supposed to have witnesses flying in and we just had two witnesses who could get to the

get to the Capitol. And in that hearing, Senator Lieberman turned to two of us and said,

we need to look at having a Department of Homeland Security, which does not sound as foreign now as it certainly did then.

No one was even using the word homeland long before the TV series, long before anybody was looking

at it.

And so I ended up working on the legislation to create DHS from

September of 2001 to November of 2002 right up until President Bush came out with a

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