Active defense cybersecurity measures such as the Homeland Security Department's Einstein program will become increasingly common and although they may pose a challenge to privacy, they don't lessen civil liberties, says James Andrew Lewis in a an essay printed as part of a Center for a New American Security report on cybersecurity. Lewis is director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' technology and public policy program.

"Given the potential intrusiveness of active defense, strengthened oversight procedures and limitations on the use of personal data are essential. The challenge for the privacy community is to find a way to help provide new rules for oversight without blocking the use of the new defensive technologies," Lewis writes. Doing so will require the privacy community to give up some of its fundamental precepts about the necessity of anonymity and opposition to government regulation, Lewis writes.

Anonymity tends to be equated with civil liberties in the privacy community, but Lewis argues that the two aren't synonymous. In societies were freedom of speech is well established, anonymity can undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions, and as a result, weaken the protections government provide for civil liberties.

"A complete lack of anonymity conjures up images of an Orwellian police state. Complete anonymity in turn produces a Hobbesian state of nature. Neither extreme is preferable," he says, adding that the current situation within the United States is closer to a Hobbesian state of nature than may best serve the public interest.

As for governments' role, the rise of cloud computing points to an emerging role for regulation that parallels the development of the electricity utility industry, Lewis asserts.

In any case, Lewis adds, the American concept of cyberspace as a domain free from sovereign control is disappearing around the globe.

Continued espousal of early 1990s-era Internet philosophies "will keep the United States on the defensive, as it tries to preserve an increasingly inadequate Internet governance model, and may even condemn the United States to irrelevance, as other nations move to new approaches where governments play the same role in cyberspace that they play in other multilateral activities," Lewis writes.

For more:
- go to the Center for a New American Security report download page

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