Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Andrew Orlowski of The Register (U.K.) recently posted a very interesting essay making the case for treating online copyright and privacy as essentially the same problem in need of the same solution: increased property rights. In his essay (“‘Don’t break the internet’: How an idiot’s slogan stole your privacy“), he argues that, “The absence of [...]
In their paper, “Loving the Cyber Bomb? The Dangers of Threat Inflation in Cybersecurity Policy,” my Mercatus Center colleagues Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins warned of the dangers of “threat inflation” in cybersecurity policy debates. In early 2011, Mercatus also published a paper by Sean Lawson, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at [...]
From The Hill this weekend: But James Lewis, the director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said “no serious analyst doubts the risk anymore” of a cyber attack. “There are people who are naturally skeptical about anything the government says and there are the ones who [...]
On Wednesday, administration and military officials simulated a cyber attack for a group of senators in an attempt to show a dire need for cybersecurity legislation. All 100 senators were invited to the simulation, which “demonstrated how the federal government would respond to an attack on the New York City electrical grid during a summer [...]
After the NSA’s aggressive pursuit of a greater role in civilian cybersecurity, and last week’s statement by Sen. John McCain criticizing the Lieberman-Collins bill for not including a role for the agency, some feared that the new G.O.P. cybersecurity bill would allow the military agency to gather information about U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. So, [...]
Tomorrow Sen. John McCain, along with five other Republican senators, plans to unveil a cybersecurity bill to rival the Lieberman-Collins bill that Majority Leader Harry Reid has said he plans to bring to the Senate floor without an official markup by committee. At a hearing earlier this month, Sen. McCain criticized the Lieberman-Collins bill for [...]
I’m pleased to report that the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just released my huge new white paper, “Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle.” I’ve been working on this paper for a long time and look forward to finding it a home in a law journal some [...]
Ahead of today’s cybersecurity hearing in the Senate, I wanted to jot down some thoughts on the issue. For over a year now, I’ve been questioning the need for federal intervention in cybersecurity and calling for a slower and more deliberate process. Perhaps I come across as a refusenik, but I hope that I’m at [...]
Here, in one sentence, is what’s wrong with Stewart Baker’s testimony on cybersecurity before the Senate Homeland Security committee today: If an asset is not designated as “covered critical infrastructure,” then the owner has no obligation under the bill to guard against attack by hackers, criminals, or nation states, leaving those who depend on the [...]
Tate Watkins and I have an essay in Wired today looking at how the overheated rhetoric and unsupported claims around cybersecurity inflate the threat and may lead us to a new cyber-industrial complex. It’s the same theme we explore in our recent Harvard National Security Journal article and also in a feature in Reason a [...]
May 22, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
