A non-state strategy for saving cyberspace.

• Author: Healey, Jason

America's future, and that of other nations and peoples, will be most secure in the long term with an emphasis on future prosperity unlocked by the Internet.

The Internet may have surpassed Johannes Gutenberg's printing press as history's most transformative invention because of how it has spawned parallel and simultaneous revolutions across other technologies. By making information so cheap to produce, compute, and share, the Internet enabled rapid advances in technologies as far afield as manufacturing and genetics.

The problem is that there is no guarantee the future of the Internet, and the larger entirety of cyberspace, will be as rosy as its past. It is possible, even likely, that the Internet will not remain as resilient, free, secure, and awesome for future generations as it has been for ours.

Imagine that twenty years after the invention of the printing press, the pope and the princes of Europe--in fact, anyone who had some basic skills and desire to do so--had the ability to determine exactly what was being printed, exactly who was printing it, and exactly to whom they were sending it. Worrying about intellectual property theft, privacy, or civil rights (had those concepts existed) would have missed the bigger picture. With no trust in the underlying communication medium, the future of Europe and the future of humanity would have been profoundly changed--not just for five years, but for 500. If the printing press was so easily compromised as computers are today, could there even have been a Renaissance or an Enlightenment?

This amazing transformative technology, the Internet, is unsustainable unless we make sweeping changes. We are all becoming absolutely dependent on an unknowably complex system where threats are growing far faster than the Internet's own defenses and resilience.

The Internet is under grave threat from data breaches (for example, Target and Home Depot), theft of commercial secrets (like the blueprints to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter), the opportunity for widespread disruptive attacks (the digital takedown of Estonia in 2007 or of Sony in 2014) and systemic failures (the Heartbleed and Shellshock vulnerabilities), the erection of sovereign borders (the Great Firewall of China), and mass surveillance (as we learned of through the Snowden revelations). For example, the Heartbleed and Shellshock bugs, discovered in 2014, affected underlying Internet technologies. These technologies in turn were only a part of vast technological systems, each with countless sub-components. Every part of that system is vulnerable, hence a disruption to any one of them might ripple through the entire system via hyper-complex interactions. It is a situation that will become orders of magnitude worse with the coming "Internet of Things."

As President Obama has said, cyberspace is a lawless Wild West. (1) Because the Internet was built on trust, not security, it is easier to attack others online than to defend against those attacks. This is a decades-old trend dating back to at least the late 1970s. If the attackers retain the advantage over defenders year after year, then over time the Internet could pass a tipping point. At that point, the Internet would become far less useful and critical than it is today. Perhaps someday soon, there will be too many predators and not enough prey.

Unfortunately, when it comes to cyberspace, governments pursue...