The White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection was hosted at Stanford University on Friday February 13. I followed the event from Sydney, via the live webcast.
It would be naive to expect the White House Cybersecurity Summit to have been less political. President Obama and his colleagues were in their comfort zone, talking up America's recent economic turnaround, and framing their recent wins squarely within Silicon Valley where the summit took place. With a few exceptions, the first two hours was more about green energy, jobs and manufacturing than cyber security. It was a lot like a lost episode of The West Wing.
The exceptions were important. Some speakers really nailed some security issues. I especially liked the morning contributions from Intel President Renee James and MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga. James highlighted that Intel has worked for 10 years to improve "the baseline of computing security", making her one of the few speakers to get anywhere near the inherent insecurity of our cyber infrastructure. The shocking truth is that cyberspace is built on terrible foundations; the software development practices and operating systems that bear the economy today were not built for the job. For mine, the Summit was too much about military/intelligence themed information sharing, and not enough about why our systems are such a shambles. I know it's a dry subject but if they're serious about security, policy makers really have to engage with software quality and reliability, instead of thrilling to kids learning to code. Software development practices are to blame for many of our problems; more on software failures here.
Ajay Banga was one of several speakers to urge the end of passwords. He summed up the authentication problem very nicely: "Stop making us remember things in order to prove who we are". He touched on MasterCard's exploration of continuous authentication bracelets and biometrics (more news of which coincidentally came out today). It's important however that policy makers' understanding of digital infrastructure resilience, cybercrime and cyber terrorism isn't skewed by everyone's favourite security topic - customer authentication. It's in need of repair yet it is not to blame for the vast majority of breaches. Mom and Pop struggle with passwords and they deserve better, but the vast majority of stolen personal data is lifted by organised criminals en masse from poorly secured back-end databases. Replacing customer passwords or giving everyone biometrics is not going to solve the breach epidemic.
Banga also indicated that the Information Highway should be more like road infrastructure. He highlighted that national routes are regulated, drivers are licensed, there are rules of the road, standardised signs, and enforcement. All these infrastructure arrangements leave plenty of room for innovation in car design, but it's accepted that "all cars have four wheels".
Tim Cook was then the warm-up act before Obama. Many on Twitter unkindly branded Cook's speech as an ad for Apple, paid for by the White House, but I'll accentuate the positives. Cook continues to campaign against business models that monetize personal data. He repeated his promise made after the ApplePay launch that they will not exploit the data they have on their customers. He put privacy before security in everything he said.
Cook painted a vision where digital wallets hold your passport, driver license and other personal documents, under the user's sole control, and without trading security for convenience. I trust that he's got the mobile phone Secure Element in mind; until we can sort out cybersecurity at large, I can't support the counter trend towards cloud-based wallets. The world's strongest banks still can't guarantee to keep credit card numbers safe, so we're hardly ready to put our entire identities in the cloud.
In his speech, President Obama reiterated his recent legislative agenda for information sharing, uniform breach notification, student digital privacy, and a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. He stressed the need for private-public partnership and cybersecurity responsibility to be shared between government and business. He reiterated the new Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. And as flagged just before the summit, the president signed an Executive Order that will establish cyber threat information sharing "hubs" and standards to foster sharing while protecting privacy.
Obama told the audience that cybersecurity "is not an ideological issue". Of course that message was actually for Congress which is deliberating over his cyber legislation. But let's take a moment to think about how ideology really does permeate this arena. Three quasi-religious disputes come to mind immediately:
- Free speech trumps privacy. The ideals of free speech have been interpreted in the US in such a way that makes broad-based privacy law intractable. The US is one of only two major nations now without a general data protection statute (the other is China). It seems this impasse is rarely questioned anymore by either side of the privacy debate, but perhaps the scope of the First Amendment has been allowed to creep out too far, for now free speech rights are in effect being granted even to computers. Look at the controversy over the "Right to be Forgotten" (RTBF), where Google is being asked to remove certain personal search results if they are irrelevant, old and inaccurate. Jimmy Wales claims this requirement harms "our most fundamental rights of expression and privacy". But we're not talking about speech here, or even historical records, but rather the output of a computer algorithm, and a secret algorithm at that, operated in the service of an advertising business. The vociferous attacks on RTBF are very ideological indeed.
- "Innovation" trumps privacy. It's become an unexamined mantra that digital businesses require unfettered access to information. I don't dispute that some of the world's richest ever men, and some of the world's most powerful ever corporations have relied upon the raw data that exudes from the Internet. It's just like the riches uncovered by the black gold rush on the 1800s. But it's an ideological jump to extrapolate that all cyber innovation or digital entrepreneurship must continue the same way. Rampant data mining is laying waste to consumer confidence and trust in the Internet. Some reasonable degree of consumer rights regulation seems inevitable, and just, if we are to avert a digital Tragedy of the Commons.
- National Security trumps privacy. I am a rare privacy advocate who actually agrees that the privacy-security equilibrium needs to be adjusted. I believe the world has changed since some of our foundational values were codified, and civil liberties are just one desirable property of a very complicated social system. However, I call out one dimensional ideology when national security enthusiasts assert that privacy has to take a back seat. There are ways to explore a measured re-calibration of privacy, to maintain proportionality, respect and trust.
President Obama described the modern technological world as a "magnificent cathedral" and he made an appeal to "values embedded in the architecture of the system". We should look critically at whether the values of entrepreneurship, innovation and competitiveness embedded in the way digital business is done in America could be adjusted a little, to help restore the self-control and confidence that consumers keep telling us is evaporating online.
