Technology News, Cybersecurity

Senate Commerce Committee backs Cruz-Warner bill to harden telecom networks

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September 27, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

The recent hacks were described as “the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history,” prompting Senators Ted Cruz and Mark Warner to introduce the Telecommunications Cybersecurity and Resilience Act. The bipartisan legislation proposes a framework of “voluntary, telecom-specific cybersecurity best practices” developed by government and private sector experts, rather than implementing regulations.

According to Senator Warner, “If telecommunications companies adopt cybersecurity best practices, our networks can be more resilient,” and this bill aims to establish a process for doing so following vulnerabilities highlighted by Salt Typhoon and other cyber threats. The act would create a working group and a voluntary certification process to strengthen the nation’s communications networks.

Telecommunications Cybersecurity and Resilience Act: Framework for Collaboration

The Telecommunications Cybersecurity and Resilience Act establishes a working group composed of telecommunications providers, suppliers, cybersecurity experts and federal agencies to formulate practical cybersecurity protocols tailored to the sector’s unique risks. This collaborative approach prioritizes risk-based solutions, a deliberate departure from what Chairman Cruz described as “rigid federal mandates that quickly become outdated.” The bill’s framework aims to address vulnerabilities exposed by intrusions like the hacks and evolving cyber threats targeting U.S. communications networks.

This certification is not a one-time event. The act mandates reviews and updates to these practices at least every two years, and following any major cyber incident or shift in the threat environment. The bill’s structure reflects a proactive stance toward maintaining network security, anticipating future challenges rather than solely reacting to immediate threats. The act’s details, including a one-pager and section-by-section analysis, are publicly available, signaling transparency in the development of these important protocols for safeguarding national communications infrastructure.

The Salt Typhoon intrusion was the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history and showed us just how vulnerable our critical infrastructure is, but it does not have to be that way.

Senator Warner
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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