Today’s global Internet in some ways is like America’s “Wild West,” a federal official says, with individual groups on duty to “look out for themselves,” according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
But the threats that civilization faces because of the Web means the global community needs to establish norms for behavior in the cyber world, contends Sarah Bloom Raskin, a deputy Treasury secretary, at a recent meeting of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board International Institute on Audit Regulation.
“The Internet today in some ways resembles America’s Wild West past, where out of necessity individuals, towns and other groups of people were forced to look out for themselves in he then-new, lawless territory,” she said. “This is why ongoing global discussions on cyber norms are so important.”
She said that because the Internet is so unfettered, “bad actors can use the Internet to cause harm.”
“Norms can make the technological frontier more secure for us all; they can create some ‘rules of the road.’ We know from the modern history of other major technological events that it takes time for consensus to develop on rules of the road,” she said.
“Remember, it took decades to advance international cooperation on controlling nuclear weapons. Today’s global discourse on appropriate behavior in cyberspace in many ways presents a similar inflection point to the early discussions to limit nuclear weapons. Once norms take hold, they provide a powerful force. If fully embedded into our collective thinking about how the world works they can make it hard to imagine operating in any other way.”
She continued: “Several examples of efforts to create consensus around cyber norms exist. For example, last year in Turkey, and reaffirmed this year in China, the leaders of the Group of Twenty economies affirmed that international law applies to nation-state conduct in cyberspace and agreed that countries should not use their cyber capabilities to steal trade secrets and other intellectual property to provide a competitive advantage to their commercial sectors.”
She specified the threats that she sees.
“The fact of the matter is that cybersecurity incidents are growing exponentially and the consequences are costly. In terms of the effects of incidents over the last several years, they have included the theft of credit and debit card accounts – through retailers like Target and Home Depot.
“Other incidents in the U.S. have included the exposure of sensitive information on hundreds of millions of individuals who kept information at banks like JP Morgan Chase, health insurers like Anthem and Premera Blue Cross, and government agencies like the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Information stolen has ranged from street and email addresses to medical identification and social security numbers, and fingerprints and detailed biographical data. In fact, we later learned that an international crime syndicate allegedly used information stolen from these and other intrusions to manipulate the prices of U.S. stocks.”
But she said “catastrophic consequences” could arise should the financial system itself be compromised, and that’s the focus of the U.S. Treasury Department’s work.
For the rest of this report, and more, please go to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
