To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
What do coronavirus, the creation of the Director of National Intelligence, the Congressional Hearing with the Tech CEOs, the trouble with TikTok, and the Twitter bitcoin scam all have in common?
All of them, at least in part, are about data—insufficiency of it, inability to share it, irresponsibility with it, insecurity of it, and unwillingness to protect it.
The world today is awash in data—more than we’ve ever had in human history, and it’s growing at a current rate of 3 quintillion bytes of data a day. With the explosion of new devices, sensors, and technologies, the data growth rate is continuing to erupt. So, if data exists in ridiculous abundance, and everyone – not just the national security community – understands its value, why are clarity, wisdom, insight, and answers to our most vexing national security and private sector challenges so elusive? And if it’s a world where the threats are to and through data, why do we keep being surprised at our adversaries’ and competitors’ attacks when we don’t invest in security?
Data is the fuel for government services and private sector activity; national security and e-commerce; situational awareness and competitive advantage; early warning and fraud detection; to name just a few. Increasingly, data is the answer to every question, the fuel of every action, and the target of every bad actor, from criminals to terrorists to state-sponsored entities.
And yet, everyone from business leaders to national security decision-makers are either under using or over relying – probably both – on data produced for a different purpose and with little understanding of its pedigree. It’s time to restructure the data ecosystem.
