In his Note to Readers of the 2022 National Cyber Power Index, Eric Rosenbach, Belfer Center Co-Director and former Chief of Staff and Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Department of Defense, writes: “With the challenges in the cyber domain only increasing, it is critical for analytical tools to also be available, presenting the full range of cyber power, and informing critical public debates today. The framework that the NCPI provides is one that allows policymakers to consider a fuller range of challenges and threats from other state actors. The incorporation of both qualitative and quantitative models, with more than 1000 existing sources of data and with 29 indicators to measure a state’s capability, is more comprehensive than any other current measure of cyber power.”

The International Council is a prestigious group of senior business leaders and former government officials who care deeply about—and financially support—the Belfer Center’s mission to advance research, ideas, and leadership for a more secure, peaceful world. As part of a Center-wide effort to strengthen our community’s diversity, the Council has increased the number of female members four-fold in recent years. 

China has the world’s largest army. Russia wields the most tanks. America owns the fanciest satellites. But who has the most cyber-power? A new National Cyber Power Index by the Belfer Centre at Harvard University ranks 30 countries on their level of ambition and capability. Offensive cyber-power—the ability to do harm in or through computer networks—is one measure. But so too are the strength of a country’s defences, the sophistication of its cyber-security industry and its ability to spread and counter propaganda.

As conventional wisdom goes, experts tend to rank the U.S ahead of China, U.K., Iran, North Korea, Russia, in terms of how strong it is when it comes to cyberspace. But a new study from Harvard University’s Belfer Center shows that China has closed the gap on the U.S. in three key categories: surveillance, cyber defense, and its efforts to build up its commercial cyber sector.

“A lot of people, Americans in particular, will think that the U.S., the U.K., France, Israel are more advanced than China when it comes to cyber power,” Eric Rosenbach, the Co-Director of Harvard’s Belfer Center, told CyberScoop. “Our study shows it’s just not the case and that China is very sophisticated and almost at a peer level with the U.S.”

The Belfer National Cyber Power Index (NCPI) measures 30 countries cyber capabilities in the context of seven national objectives, using 32 intent indicators and 27 capability indicators with evidence collected from publicly available data.

This report’s purpose is twofold: first, to inform policymakers and researchers about the current state of transatlantic AI efforts; and second, to recommend specific areas where transatlantic AI collaboration should be strengthened. Based on a comprehensive study of over 260 documents and reports covering the period from December 1997 to June 2020, we proposes more than 16 recommendations to increase US-EU AI collaboration across the entire AI ecosystem, as well as 9 recommendations for AI cooperation in the healthcare, environmental sciences, and defense sectors. Greater transatlantic efforts are needed to prevent the advancement of an AI vision that is adversarial and harmful to the wellbeing of the United States, the European Union, and allies.

Our intention is to provide the best possible understanding of cyber power capabilities to inform public debate. The Belfer approach proposes eight objectives that countries pursue using cyber means; provides a list of capabilities required to achieve those objectives that demonstrates the breadth of sources of cyber power; and compares countries based on their capability to achieve those objectives. Our work builds on existing cyber indices such as the Economist Intelligence Unit and Booz Allen Hamilton’s 2011 Cyber Power Ranking, by, for example, including a policy dimension and recognizing that cyber capabilities enhance military strength.

Recent hate crimes and violent assaults against people of Asian descent should sound an alarm for America. Within the past couple of weeks alone, ac acid attack against a woman in Brooklyn caused her to suffer severe burns, and a man in Texas has been charged with attempted murder after attacking an Asian American family. Such stories have become disturbingly frequent since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the FBI has warned that this trend may continue.

We, the undersigned, are alarmed by the severity of such hate crimes and race-based harassment against people of Asian descent in the United States - assaults that endanger the safety, well-being, dignity and livelihoods of all those targeted.

On a cool day late last September, half a dozen Chinese engineers walked into a conference room in the heart of Geneva's UN district with a radical idea. They had one hour to persuade delegates from more than 40 countries of their vision: an alternative form of the internet, to replace the technological architecture that has underpinned the web for half a century. 

Whereas today's internet is owned by everyone and no one, they were in the process of building something very different - a new infrastructure that could put power back in the hands of nation states, instead of individuals.

As the US government promises to ramp up more Covid-19 testing, an unlikely billionaire is offering to lend help: Jack Ma, cofounder of the Chinese tech giant Alibaba. Ma's philanthropic organization, the Jack Ma Foundation, said early Friday morning it would donate 500,000 Covid-19 testing kits and 1 million protective face masks to the US.