Made2Measure

In an editorial in the Washington Post last week, Ben Buchanan, the author of The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics , debunks five myths about cyberwar. Myth No. 1: Cyberwar Is Overhyped and Impossible “One of the most common myths in cybersecurity,” writes Buchanan, “is that destructive hacking is a wildly overblown threat, nearly impossible, or incapable of shaping geopolitical conflicts.” Believers of this myth are fond of pointing out that squirrels cause more blackouts than hackers.   Buchanan cites several examples to debunk this myth, including the 2015 and 2016 attacks by Russian hackers that turned off the power in parts of Ukraine, and the June 2017 Russian cyberattack “NotPetya” that caused more than $10 billion in damage around the world. The same day that Buchanan’s editorial appeared in the press last week, United States joined several countries in accusing Russia of a major cyberattack in the Republic of Georgia in lat...

This is the second in a series of blog posts beginning on February 4, 2020 focused on judicial systems’ response to the coronavirus pandemic -- SARS-CoV-2 is its technical name; Covid-19 is the disease it causes --and the justice systems’ active participation in a whole-of-society-approach (WOSA) to national security and safety threats such as Covid-19. On February 10, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) published the National Counterintelligence Strategy of the United States of America 2020-2022 , outlining “a new approach” to counterintelligence to address threats that have   become more aggressive, complex, diverse, and harmful. The new approach in the 2020-2022 counterintelligence strategy represents a new perspective on the threat landscape.  Past counterintelligence strategies categorized the threats by foreign nation-state adversaries and non-state actors by the nature the threat – nuclear, chemical, biological, cyber, and natural and ma...

State and federal courts are becoming acutely   aware of their vulnerabilities   to cyberattacks on their case management systems, computer networks, websites, and other parts of their information technology infrastructure (see Court Manager Vol. 34 #4 – Winter 2019 , “Courts Have a Significant Role to Play in the Whole-of-Government Approach (WGA) to Our Safety and Security”; and   National Center for State Courts , “Current cybersecurity threats highlight need for state courts to have prevention and response policies in place.” Entrepreneurship and Innovation Keys to Economic Growth Another vulnerability which poses an oversized threat to our national security but has received far less attention, lies not in courts’ IT infrastructure but in court processes, especially bankruptcy proceedings. Bankruptcy is a legal process through which persons who cannot repay their debts seek relief from those debts.   The link between entrepreneurship, innovation, a...

This is the first in a series of blog posts about judicial systems’ response to the coronavirus ( SARS-CoV-2 is its technical name; Covid-19 is the disease it causes ) outbreak and the justice systems’ active participation in a whole-of-society-approach (WOSA) to national security and safety threats such as Covid-19. On January 30 the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus a global-health emergency. As health authorities and governments struggled to control the advance of the dangerous disease, and experts scrambled to figure out how   it is transmitted, what the duration of the incubation period might be (generally between three and seven days, with the longest period being 14 days), how many other people each infected person will infect (epidemiologists call this the reproduction number), and how and when people without symptoms can spread the disease, the use of quarantine and isolation of people created urgent civil liberty issues for courts. Generally, for...