Congress is a tech-savvier place today than it was when Edward Amoroso, AT&T’s (T) chief security officer, started making trips to Washington more than 20 years ago.

Back then, he says, he would discuss virus threats at length before a lawmaker would raise his hand. “You’re expecting some question that might impress you, and they’d ask, ‘Can you tell me what a virus is?’”

Yesterday, however, when he addressed the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, he was surprised to hear senators fluently discussing botnets and the recent cyber-attack against Estonia.

Exchanging glances with colleagues after the hearing, he recalls, “We made that face that you make when you’re kind of impressed.”

The subcommittee handles a wide range of communications, security and technology issues, and it conducted the hearing, titled “Cybersecurity: Assessing Our Vulnerabilities and Developing an Effective Defense,” to identify security threats and changes the government needs to make to fend them off.

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On Aug. 14th, just 82 days before the general election, John McCain released his technology platform, an extraordinarily important document, if only because of the extraordinary importance technology has to the Nation’s economy. This platform touted John McCain’s experience. It described him as the former chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, a committee that plays a major role in the development of technology policy. And indeed for much of the last decade, John McCain has led the most important committee in Congress dealing with Internet and technology matters. But that experience, in my view, brings with it a certain responsibility. For the single most important fact about the Internet’s development over the last decade has been the extraordinary decline the United States has faced compared to our competitors.

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