Cybersecurity and Cyberwarfare

The US government has initiated an extraordinary outreach campaign to foreign allies, trying to persuade wireless and internet providers in these countries to avoid telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei Technologies Co., apparently. American officials have briefed their government counterparts and telecom executives in friendly countries where Huawei equipment is already in wide use, including Germany, Italy and Japan, about what they see as cybersecurity risks.

In 2017, Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules. White House ethics officials learned of Trump’s repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit.

The Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) controls the export of dual-use and less sensitive military items through the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), including the Commerce Control List (CCL). As controls on exports of technology are a key component of the effort to protect sensitive U.S. technology, many sensitive technologies are listed on the CCL, often consistent with the lists maintained by the multilateral export control regimes of which the United States is a member.

The scale of Chinese state support for the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G, the close supply chain integration between the United States and China, and China’s role as an economic and military competitor to the United States create enormous economic, security, supply chain, and data privacy risks for the United States.

After unleashing widespread cyberattacks and disinformation warfare on the US during the 2016 presidential election, Russia’s trolls and hackers mostly appeared to have sat on the sidelines during the campaign ahead of the midterm elections. No one is sure why.  Several factors may have reduced Moscow’s impact. Clint Watts, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said the diffuse nature of congressional and state races makes them a harder target than a single presidential election.

The time has come for a new set of guardrails for information capitalism that protect citizens and promote marketplace competition. The framework for such policies already exists and is embedded in the principles of common law. Companies have responsibilities: a “duty of care” to not cause harm, and a “duty to deal” to prevent monopoly bottlenecks. The harvesting of personal information – often without the individual’s knowledge – infringes on the sovereignty of the individual and their personal privacy.

Officials in Beijing are providing governments around the world with technology and training that enable them to control their own citizens. As Chinese companies compete with their international counterparts in crucial fields such as artificial intelligence and 5G mobile service, the democratic norms that long governed the global Internet are falling by the wayside. When it comes to Internet freedom, many governments are eager to buy the restrictive model that China is selling.