Security News > 2021 > June > Garland: More "Depth" Needed to Protect Against Cyberattacks
Attorney General Merrick Garland said Tuesday that private industry needs better safeguards to avoid calamitous consequences in the event of cyberattacks like the ones that have targeted American infrastructure and corporations.
"You have to have a secondary method if your first method is shut down. You have to have depth, and we need to work with them on that," Garland said, one week after a meeting between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin that included discussion of a spate of Russia-linked ransomware attacks in recent months.
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with reporters, his first since being confirmed in March as the country's chief law enforcement officer, Garland also reiterated his concerns about the death penalty, defended the Justice Department's position in a defamation case against former President Donald Trump and insisted that the government would work to protect both journalists' personal safety and their ability to conceal their confidential sources.
The conversation occurred as Garland has faced demands from Democrats to swiftly undo or reverse positions taken by the Justice Department during the Trump administration, including aggressive leak investigations in which law enforcement obtained phone records of journalists and congressional officials.
The Justice Department inspector general is now investigating, and Garland met last week with executives from news media organizations after pledging that the government would abandon the practice of seizing reporters' records in an effort to identify their sources.
Garland said the case law that government lawyers had reviewed tilted in favor of the argument that defamatory statements made to the news media by a public official are protected by law.