The New US President Must Win the Cyber War On Terror
The trenches of modern warfare are now being tunneled in Cyberspace, and the next US president and Congress must dig in and give comfort to the American public that they will commit to winning the cyber war on terror.
America’s Cold War has become a Code War. The recent announcement by Yahoo that state-sponsored hackers raided 500 million customer accounts is just the latest in a year of increasingly aggressive state-led Cyberattacks against American consumers, government and economic interests.
In 2016 alone the Russian intelligence services have hacked the servers of the Democratic National Committee and release the personal emails and phone numbers of members of Congress and congressional staff. We have knowledge that foreign hackers breached voter registration systems in my home state of Illinois and in Arizona in a possible attempt to influence the November elections. And we know that a Russian hacker is behind high-profile attacks on American social networking companies LinkedIn and Tumblr.
These incidents, like the 2015 North Korea hack on Sony, have come to light because they are cyber battles in a greater cyber war that we did not win. And they aren’t rare occurrences. State-sponsored hackers are regularly attempting to take down international banking services and US government websites and wiping the computer servers of multibillion-dollar American companies.
The US is now in the midst of World War 3.0 and cannot afford to fight this as a silent war in the shadows. Just as America prioritized personnel recruitment in its spy agencies and defense modernization in the military during the Cold War, they are being asked to do the same today for the Code War.
Congress must be actively engaged in promoting initiatives, legislation and funding streams that help our national security apparatus and international partners deal with Cyber threats. Considering the stakes of the next four years, it is important that the next American president must be prepared to be the first Cyber Wartime president.
Americans think the best computer minds and innovators must be brought into government. The future of democratic elections, the electric grid and economic infrastructure depend on it, and US national security now hinges on the ability to recruit more Mark Zuckerbergs than Jason Bournes.
