Science, Technology, and Public Policy

The recent cyberattack that crippled much of the web last week took advantage of vulnerabilities in home products connected to the internet. Fixing those flaws is possible but it requires public action and industry cooperation.

"As the U.S. Congress considers the appropriate role for the federal government in the encryption debate, policymakers should be mindful of the impact of their actions both within and beyond the United States. To date, the U.S. and Europe are on one side of an Internet governance spectrum favoring the multi-stakeholder status quo with India in the middle, followed by China, and Russia undertaking the most state-centric approach to both Internet governance generally and encryption specifically."

"In little more than a generation, the Internet has become the substrate of the global economy and governance worldwide. Several billion more human users will be added in the next decade, as will tens of billions of devices, ranging from thermostats to industrial control systems (the 'Internet of Things'). All of this burgeoning interdependence implies vulnerabilities that governments and non-governmental actors can exploit. At the same time, we are only beginning to come to terms with the national-security implications of this. Strategic studies of the cyber domain resemble nuclear strategy in the 1950s: analysts are still not clear about the meaning of offense, defense, deterrence, escalation, norms, and arms control."

"The states should add an amendment to their constitutions for a general right of privacy, as is now included in the state constitution of California; Congress should create a federal Privacy Commission, whose role would be to investigate violations of privacy laws and bring cases to the Department of Justice for prosecution, modeled after the Privacy Commission of Canada; Congress should also strengthen existing federal privacy laws."