Why National Security Is a Shared Burden Between the State and the Private Sector

Plus, how geopolitical competition between the West and China could bring about the ‘splinternet.’

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Three Tech Trends

Technology’s role in our daily lives is amazing. In many ways, we’re experiencing a renaissance in innovation that is making the world more accessible, understandable, and enjoyable. Just check out this video as an example of what I’m talking about: 

But of course, it’s not all puppies and unicorns. Technology is also fundamentally reshaping huge swaths of society and many of these changes even have national security implications. This raises the question: What’s driving these changes and where are they likely to lead? 

Well, here are three trends I believe are especially important. 

First, we’re innovating faster than we can secure. Every day we see new applications, new capabilities, and new technology businesses coming into existence and offering unparalleled opportunities for human thriving and economic growth. But, with many of these innovations comes new vulnerabilities and we’re not accounting for them as quickly as we create them.  

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  1. Sam Cribbs

    Well done!

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    Ben Connelly

    Klon, the headline alone and premise of this newsletter provide exactly what I’m talking about with you vs. Scott Lincicome.

    “ National security burdens are now shared between the state and the private sector.”

    And:

    “ The bottom line here is that government isn’t going to out-google Google. The private sector is where the talent, ability, and resources are when it comes to next-generation technologies, and this means the government is now a security stakeholder and not the stakeholder.

    Both the public and private sectors are realizing and reconciling themselves to this new reality and that accounts for a great deal of the tech-related disruption we all feel.”

    I sense that you and he do not see eye to eye on laissez faire vs industrial policy. This is why it’s a debate worth having. I’m torn between the two of you. The conservative (and sometimes warmed-over Luddite) in me thinks maybe we ought to pull a Ron Swanson and throw our computers in the trash (not really, haha). The libertarian in me says, “creative destruction? The only problem is that we don’t have enough of it.”

    “ The downstream effect of these trends is a gradual fracturing of the internet, as the underlying infrastructure of the world wide web, and the digital economies relying on that web, become more geographically separated. Broader geopolitical competition between the West and China makes this “splinternet” even more likely. ”

    Now, with this third trend, I’d like to throw out an idea: maybe it’s good. In the Cold War, there was a fair amount of economic and technological disconnect between First and Second World. This meant that the Cold War really was a competition between not only two sets of competing regimes/ideologies, but a fundamental conflict between two world orders. If we are to have a new Cold War, maybe this is in fact what we need. A natural decoupling with China, including technologically. One of the problems people keep raising with this new Cold War stuff is that we’re too interconnected. Well, if we had totally separate internets, wouldn’t it be harder for the CCP to infiltrate our networks? Wouldn’t competition be easier? Wouldn’t the lines be drawn more clearly?

    “ Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s American Innovation and Choice Online Act, for example, would appear to allow Apple or Google to be sued for removing Russian propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik, because such actions could be interpreted as discriminating against “similarly situated business users.””

    You and I are in total agreement here.

    “ Now, none of this is a dispositive argument on the advisability of antitrust one way or the other and I’ve certainly had my differences with all of these companies. But I guarantee Sen. Klobuchar and her four Republican cosponsors ( Grassley, Graham, Hawley, and Daines) support “Big Tech’s” actions against Russia and would be twisted in knots if such actions had not been taken. Furthermore, conservative detractors of tech's so-called “totalitarianism” would do well to remember the next time they accuse these businesses of being “enemies of the people,” that this is Marxist language and that these companies are part of a coalition enabling free peoples around the world to organize and to resist totalitarianism—even at great risk to company profits and employees.”

    Well put!

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    Ray Salemi

    The numbers about cybercrime at the beginning of the piece are large, but they do need the context of overall productivity and economic growth. Are these losses 10% 1% or 0.1% of the benefit?

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    Philbnichols

    Great stuff, very helpful to me. Putting important, complex stuff on the low shelf for dufuses like me. Thanks.

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    Bill Nelson

    If innovation is so rapid, why haven’t innovations in cybersecurity kept pace? I would think that there’d be some security app that senses the intrusion and sends back an app that turns off the fans of the offending system and jacks up the processor speed to fry the device by playing Baby Shark in a continuous loop.

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  6. Kurt Von Fuchs

    Senator Klobuchar's bill is not much better than what the Chinese communist party is doing.

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    Pat @ Tavi Hall

    On Facebook, Ukraine, and violence, I think about what would they have done during WWII. I'm fairly sure newspapers of that day ran editorials that wouldn't have passed the current Facebook violence standard, but there were no truly international news sources.

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    Francesca

    My sister in law is Ukrainian. Its been astonishing to me to watch her father use facebook to help raise a voluntary militia in central Ukraine. Yesterday he was posting on how to make a bullet proof vest. A few Days ago it was about making grenades. This guy is a grandfather, in his 60s. Cannot find words to convey the disgust I feel about right wingers criticizing Facebook’s ‘hypocrisy’ in allowing expressions of violence against Russians. It’s very interesting to learn from this article that if these right wingers had had their way, it would have been impossible for my nephews grandpa to display the motto and crest of their local militia.

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  9. david scardino

    Not to be simplistic, but from working on computer applications since the early 1970's, it seems to me the only question developers ever ask is "Is this something we can do? rather than "Is this something we should do?" Big difference.

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      Bill Nelson

      I spent 30 years in highly reliable safety critical systems and the question is always “what is the right thing to do”.

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    Will I Am

    Thanks for the insights, Klon. The tension between innovation and gov oversight will only grow more pronounced, it seems. It’s complicated business. Glad you’re here to help sort it out for us.

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