But they are to be expected because they are an inevitable outcome of using an open network to convey information we mean to keep closed. Or what about simply freezing 21 million Americans’ bank accounts or changing their credit scores? With 21 million files, it’s not too hard to grind the American economy to a halt, even temporarily.ĭata breaches aren’t pretty, and the things smart hackers and governments can do with even peripheral files dwarf any of the cable TV drama scenarios I’m imagining here. How well can an ambassador function when the foreign government he’s attempting to strong arm can blackmail him over things he’s confessed to his supervisors but not his wife? Or consider how effectively operatives can perform in the field when their counterparts have access to their medical or psychological histories. Imagine how well pilots perform when they find out their family’s bank account at home has been frozen. But with their hands on private personnel data – particularly that of officials and operatives with the highest levels of security clearance – they have unpredictable leverage in any number of situations. Sure, it’s inconvenient for all these workers to have their Social Security numbers and other important records released, but it’s not like the enemy has our nuclear launch codes. No, instead of compromising the Internet and its users to secure sensitive data better – essentially conceding that the Internet is another high-stakes battlefield – we should get sensitive data off the people’s network.įirst, it’s important to appreciate the gravity of the most recent breach. This latest cyberattack, which investigators think originated in China – right on the heels of an attack on the Internal Revenue Service, which the agency believes originated in Russia – can easily be misinterpreted as a call to tighten up security of the Internet, spy on users even more closely and further compromise the openness of the world’s communication infrastructure.īut we must not let our inability to tighten security on the Net lead us into increasingly paranoid surveillance of our citizens and restrictions on the freedoms of Internet users. Any one of these incidents, we fear, could be the other shoe dropping on our nation’s computer insecurity, crippling blows to our networking infrastructure.īut each new tremor before the seemingly inevitable “big one” is also an opportunity to reconsider our relationship to data, to secrecy and to the Internet itself. Americans are right to respond to every computer problem with the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines or The Wall Street Journal, as happened on the same day earlier this week, with dread.
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