Reports & Papers

37 Items

Paper

The Coming AI Hackers

| April 2021

Hacking is generally thought of as something done to computer systems, but this conceptualization can be extended to any system of rules. The tax code, financial markets, and any system of laws can be hacked. This essay considers a world where AIs can be hackers. This is a generalization of specification gaming, where vulnerabilities and exploits of our social, economic, and political systems are discovered and exploited at computer speeds and scale.

Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci

AP/Alex Brandon

Paper - Centre for International Governance Innovation

US Intelligence, the Coronavirus and the Age of Globalized Challenges

| Aug. 24, 2020

This essay makes three arguments. First, the US government will need to establish a coronavirus commission, similar to the 9/11 commission, to determine why, since April 2020, the United States has suffered more coronavirus fatalities than any other country in the world. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic represents a watershed for what will be a major national security theme this century: biological threats, both from naturally occurring pathogens and from synthesized biology. Third, intelligence about globalized challenges, such as pandemics, needs to be dramatically reconceptualized, stripping away outmoded levels of secrecy.

PRC flag with digital overlay

Adobe Stock

Paper - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Governing Cyberspace: State Control vs. The Multistakeholder Model

| August 2019

This paper is part of a Track-II dialogue between the Belfer Center’s China Cyber Policy Initiative and the China Institute for International Strategic Studies (CIISS) to manage the risk of cyber conflict between the two countries through dialogue and concrete policy recommendations. The paper includes two parts: a cyber governance theory written by Chinese People’s Liberation Army Major General (ret.) Hao Yeli, a senior adviser to CIISS, and a response prepared by Belfer Center Co-Director Eric Rosenbach and Research Assistant Shu Min Chong.

Paper - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

The Geopolitics of Information

| May 28, 2019

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.

Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow and the 28 Permanent Representatives to the North Atlantic Council visit NATO’s cyber defence centre at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Mons, Belgium on Friday, 23 January 2015.

NATO

Report - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

National Counter-Information Operations Strategy

| February 2019

While nation-state competitors have employed propaganda and information operations (IO) targeting the United States for decades, in recent years their efforts have changed dramatically. The rise of the Internet and social media as mechanisms for disseminating news has made our country both more globally interconnected and simultaneously more vulnerable to foreign efforts to destabilize our democracy. There is now clear evidence that Russia used influence operations designed to undermine U.S. democracy and citizens’ trust in its integrity in both the 2016 and 2018 election cycles. Adversaries are actively using information as a weapon to attack the United States, our political system, and citizens’ trust in it.

Election Cyber Incident Communications Plan Template: International Edition

Adobe Stock

Report - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Election Cyber Incident Communications Plan Template: International Edition

May 2018

This Template is primarily intended for use by political parties or campaigns as a foundation from which they can develop their own tailored communications response plans, which include best practices, recommended external response processes, and scenarios to anticipate an election cyber incident.

Paper - Cyber Security Project, Belfer Center

Countering the Proliferation of Malware

| June 27, 2017

Malicious software is adapted, stolen, bought, and used everyday on a global scale. There are better ways to counter this proliferation than export controls. Policymakers should strengthen incentives for researchers and the private sector to rapidly identify software vulnerabilities, disclose them to developers, patch those vulnerabilities, and adopt those patches. Building on previous debates, this paper makes specific recommendations to shorten the lifecycle of vulnerabilities and improve the short term health of the software security ecosystem.