The recent paper published by the Council on Foreign Relations entitled, Internet Governance in an age of Cyber Insecurity has outlined significant problems associated with the growing inability to govern and control global Cyber Insecurity. In an ever connected world exemplified by the advancements contained within the Internet, Cyber-Crime, industrial espionage and advancements in Cyber Warfare have created a unique situational imbalance. Essentially, Moore’s law has proved that the advancements in technology will not only evolve at an exponential rate (creating interconnected booming global economies and global technological advancements) but exposing the unsecured euphemistic electronic back door has created a precariously dangerous situation which non-state and state actors have used to immense proportions.
The Council has outlined three approaches the United States should guide and lead in combating cyber insecurity:
1) Take a network distributed approach to a network distributive problem, essentially nurturing solutions over a broad range of ideas and propagating intellectual property forums within private and state actors.
2) Move toward a state-to-state relationship in which states are held responsible for their citizen’s networking actions. Even though the US or other states cannot stop all technological malicious behavior, the Council does say states should hold reasonable standards for security by passing laws and creating mechanisms to capture cyber violators by investigation and prosecution.
3) Inevitably, the US should lead by example and take steps to prioritize cleaning up its national Cyber infrastructure and make clear that cyber security is a core value to military defense as a national and international connectivity priority.
Unless someone has not used major technological advancements within the last few decades, you would probably have noticed cell phones have developed from bricks to micro-processing computers, immediate networking interconnectivity via e-mail and internet phones, and who can’t forget facebook and twitter has progressed from internet’s Laissez-Faire networking capabilities. Unfortunately, if you have used those new technological advancements, you probably have noticed spam, phishing programs and for the unlucky few, identity theft. This rise in cyber crime, the emergence of cyber espionage and the inevitability for cyber warfare to be used as a conventional military doctrine has given rise to a wave of new security initiatives to combat these cyber insecurities.
The report states that the yearly average of cyber crime has resulted in $1-trillion-dollar-a-year damage to the global economy. Not only has non-state actors utilized the euphemistic technological back-door to gain but state actors have utilized it as well. The 2007 Estonian national level ‘denial of service’ attack resulted in a week-long national infrastructure and telecommunication crash. In the weeks prior to the 2008 invasion of Georgia, the Russian government claimed “Patriotic Hackers” had flooded Georgia’s internet infrastructure in a cyber-overload to disrupt communications. Coupled with the recent US military network hack of the Wikileaks Afghan war logs, and Cyber threats from China and other states, the US military is reviewing weaknesses in its internet security infrastructure from a growing cyber-threat capability.
Thus, the US must take the reign in creating a consortium of nurtured solutions to realize a secure internet infrastructure but also one that does not reduce network efficiency and allow traffic to conduct business without increasing electronic barriers, accessibility and reliability. Undersecretary of defense William J. Lynn III stated, “Protecting those networks and the networks that undergrid critical US infrastructure must be part of Washington’s national security and homeland defense missions.” The undersecretary continued commenting on the need for private networks to be secure as well stating, “The best-laid plans for defending military networks will matter little if civilian infrastructure which could be directly targeted in a military conflict or held hostage and used as a bargaining chip against the US government is not secure… The Pentagon is therefore working with the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector to look for innovative ways to use the military’s cyber defense capabilities to protect the defense industry."
Council on Foreign Relations Report
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