Cyber Project

Stories like the recent Facebook hack, the Equifax hack and the hacking of government agencies might make headlines for a few days, but they're just the newsworthy tip of a very large iceberg. The risks are about to get worse, because computers are being embedded into physical devices and will affect lives, not just our data. Security is not a problem the market will solve. The government needs to step in and regulate this increasingly dangerous space.

Recently, one of us spent a week in China discussing the future of war with a group of American and Chinese academics. Everyone speculated about the role of artificial intelligence (AI), but, surprisingly, many Chinese participants equated AI almost exclusively with armies of killer robots.

Our grab-bag approach isn’t working. Gen. David Petraeus says it’s time to go big.

A colleague and I recently published an op-ed in Svenska Dagbladet, one of Sweden’s leading daily newspapers, about Russia’s attempts to influence elections in democratic countries. Among the Russian tactics we described was the use of “troll factories” to distribute misinformation. So perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised when we were attacked online, probably by Russian trolls, after our article posted.

Cyber security is a relatively new international problem. A decade ago, it received little attention as an international issue, but since 2013 the Director of National Intelligence has named cyber security risks as the biggest threat facing the USA. Although the exact numbers can be debated, various non-profit organisations have listed hundreds of state-sponsored attacks by a score of countries in the past decade. Many observers have called for laws and norms to manage the growing cyber threat. In this paper the author outlines the key normative restraints on cyber conflict. The author draws on the development of international norms in recent history to offer insights into the formation of normative restraints in the cyber realm.

You may not realize it, but you probably interact with some space object every day. Maybe it’s your car, your television or even your internet — each relies on some space-orbiting satellite to function. Satellites are accessed by millions of devices a day and are robust providers of service. But trusting these satellites as much as we do is risky as they are all extremely vulnerable to cyberattacks.

The Internet has always been much more than a venue for conflict and competition; it is the backbone of global commerce and communication. That said, cyberspace is not, as is often thought, simply part of the global commons in the way that the air or the sea is. States assert jurisdiction over, and companies claim ownership of, the physical infrastructure that composes the Internet and the data that traverses it. States and companies built the Internet, and both are responsible for maintaining it. Actions taken in the public sector affect the private sector, and vice versa. In this way, the Internet has always been hybrid in nature. 

So, accordingly, is the real cyberwar threat.

The government is facing a severe shortage of skilled workers, especially in information technology and cyber security jobs. The conventional wisdom in branches of policy and public administration is that the shortage is driven by low salaries that are not competitive for attracting top talent. Using longitudinal data on high skilled workers between 1993 and 2013, this paper shows that, if anything, government employees earn more than their private sector counterparts. Although government workers tend to earn less in the raw data, these differences are driven by the correlation between unobserved ability and selection into private sector jobs. These results are robust to additional data from the Census Bureau between 2005 and 2016. Instead, this paper shows that a more plausible culprit behind the worker shortage in government is a lack of development opportunities and poor management.

To help us think seriously about data ethics, we need case studies that we can discuss, argue about, and come to terms with as we engage with the real world. Good case studies give us the opportunity to think through problems before facing them in real life. And case studies show us that ethical problems aren't simple. They are multi-faceted, and frequently there's no single right answer. And they help us to recognize there are few situations that don't raise ethical questions.