CybersecurityCyberspace Is Critical Infrastructure – It Will Take Effective Government Oversight to Make It Safe

By Francine Berman

Published 10 August 2020

A famous 1990s New Yorker cartoon showed two dogs at a computer and a caption that read “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The New Yorker cartoon doesn’t apply today. Not only do your browser, service provider and apps know you’re a dog, they know what breed you are, what kind of dog food you eat, who your owner is and where your doghouse is. Cyberspace can function as critical infrastructure only when it’s safe for everyone, but legal and regulatory protections in cyberspace have not kept up with the times.

A famous 1990s New Yorker cartoon showed two dogs at a computer and a caption that read “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The cartoon represents a digital past when people required few safeguards on the internet. People could explore a world of information without having every click tracked or their personal data treated as a commodity.

The New Yorker cartoon doesn’t apply today. Not only do your browser, service provider and apps know you’re a dog, they know what breed you are, what kind of dog food you eat, who your owner is and where your doghouse is. Companies are parlaying that information into profit.

Legal and regulatory protections in cyberspace have not kept up with the times. They are better suited to the internet of the past than the present. Today’s dependence on the internet has thrust society into a new era, making effective public protections critical for a healthy cyberspace.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made cyberspace critical infrastructure. When schools, stores, restaurants and community gathering places closed, the U.S. went online and digital technologies became the primary platform for education, grocery delivery, services and many workplaces.

In the last four months, I’ve attended a Zoom funeral, a Zoom wedding and taken ballet classes online. This fall I’ll teach online. Many of the shifts from on-site to online are here to stay, and I predict the “new normal” will put much more emphasis on interacting in cyberspace.

This creates new urgency for public protections. As former head of a national Supercomputer Center and a data scientist, I’ve seen that digital exploitation of personal information is the pandemic in cyberspace. It puts individuals and society at risk.

The Need for Government Action
Public leadership is needed to solve this public problem. But for the most part, the federal government has left the private sector to regulate itself. Today, data is a commodity, and relying on the fox to guard the henhouse has not brought the needed protections.

Evidence of digital exploitation is everywhere. Online dating services Grindr, Tinder and OKCupid share personal data on sexual orientation and location with advertisers. Commercial data brokers sell lists of “dementia sufferers” and “Hispanic payday loan responders” to predators and others. Cambridge Analytica used personal information to manipulate a presidential election. Before public outcry, Zoom handed over user information to FacebookHigh school studentspeaceful protesters and others have become targets of mass surveillance and facial recognition.