One of the most striking elements of today's threat picture is that plots to attack America increasingly involve American residents and citizens.

So not only do we need to deal with threats as they emerge, we have to be thinking in anticipation of future threats, and the things we do have to be things that enable the system to continue to work.

Now, a lot of what we are doing right now, quite frankly, is because of what happened on Christmas. Many of the things were kind of in the works. We were already planning, for example, the purchase and deployment of advanced imaging technology. You call them body scanners. We call them AITs (Advanced Imaging Technologies).

If American schooling is inadequate now, just imagine how much more obsolete it will be when today's kindergarten students graduate from high school in just 12 years.

It drove home, personally, the value of early detection and education and intervention.

It's always been government's role to protect the security of the nation. And cyber-attacks is a security issue, from our perspective. And it's a security issue of particular concern with respect to the nation's core critical infrastructure, the infrastructure everyone relies on, the energy sector, the telecommunications sector, the banking sector.

One of the most striking elements of today's threat picture is that plots to attack America increasingly involve American residents and citizens.