Great Op-Ed by Alex Stamos on what the USA Federal Government should do about cyberattacks like the one that has just been revealed in which Putin's spy agency (probably) has secretly had access to the computers of most of the top USA federal agencies: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/15/enough-is-enough-heres-what-we-should-do-defend-against-next-russian-cyberattacks/

Read it to see Stamos's ideas. He is a very experienced and thoughtful leader. The bottom line is that the United States — government and industry and people — need to start treating cyber-*defense* and not just cyber-*offense* as a national priority.

As Stamos describes, cyber-defense has always received anemic support at the federal government level. As he says, offense is sexy—giant missiles, killing people with drones, reading the Ayatollah's email. Defense is boring: it's the roads and bridges of the 21st century.

But I've got news for you: those roads and bridges are now the Internet.

And the Internet is now the foundation, not only of our national security (e.g. this devastating cyberattack by Putin), and not only of our economy, which is the best in the world, in part because of the open Internet, but it is also the foundation of every citizen's daily life.

Family, education, health, jobs, art, love… literally everything that we all care about and depend on every day depends on the Internet.

Throughout 2020 there have been moves from various USA federal agencies to try to further weaken our national infrastructure by banning encryption in order to make it easier for law enforcement to hunt for criminals.

This is based on a profoundly misguided understanding of where we are in history. There *is* a clash of civilizations between tyrannical and free societies, and there is a clash between accelerating centralization of power versus an open and pluralistic society.

Encryption is fundamentally on the side of the good guys. It defends individuals against tyranny, and it defends open and democratic societies against aggressive foreign enemies.

As I write this, I've been hearing disturbing rumors of even more misguided rule-making in the works, intended to limit the ability of Americans to make use of protective technologies like Bitcoin and Zcash. I sincerely hope those rumors prove to be false.