The president’s announcement Friday of a new czar to protect our cybersecurity misses the point, says Douglas Rushkoff. We need a generation of hand-to-hand digital soldiers, not armchair generals.
Neither President Obama’s announcement Friday of a new “cyber czar” nor the Pentagon’s simultaneous creation of a central “Cyber Command” from which to defend our nation’s networks will be enough to bring us up to speed in a rapidly evolving global race for digital superiority. For while America is indeed falling behind in network security, the appointment of a czar to manage yet another highly centralized, top-down extension of the administration only betrays our chronic, almost constitutional inability to engage in distributed warfare by distributed means.
Cybersecurity is not like protecting a cannon or some nuclear fissile material. The barbarians are not at the gates. They’re inside your PC right now, or just behind that banner ad—the fake one telling you there’s a spybot on your hard drive and to “click here” to remove it. Because of the ‘Net’s decentralized nature, cyberwarfare is less like an artillery battle than it is like hand-to-hand combat. We are all on the frontlines; each of our computers the potential weak spot in the network. Our vulnerabilities are the passwords they “phish” from us by faking messages from the bank, the Social Security numbers they pry from poorly managed university servers, and the computer-processing power they rob from the laptops of millions of porn users whose hard drives are now nodes in our enemies’ bot-nets.
Network defenseless can be measured in how easily we fall for fake news reports and disinformation, how poorly we distinguish between credible sources and sheer propaganda (whether our own or someone else’s), and how quickly we will share our most intimate details in return for a chance at a free iPod or new “friend” on Facebook.
Indeed, the better we adapt to our roles as online consumers, the more likely we are as a population to mindlessly hit “submit.”
We also need real cybersoldiers. But candidates for such jobs aren’t simply invented in military-training camps—they’re grown by a society that values online skills. I gave a keynote address at a cybersecurity summit this past spring in Louisiana, along with General Robert Elder, then-head of the Air Force’s “Cyber Command.” His main concern? That not enough American kids know how to program.
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