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The first presidential debate of the 2016 election was this week, and I thought it would be valuable to give our readers an evaluation of the candidates’ answers on cybersecurity. The question was asked at the start of the “Securing America”segment of the debate, and a transcript is available for those who did not see the debate.
If the cybersecurity question were being asked in a college course, perhaps “science for future presidents,”I would give Secretary Clinton a B+ for her answer. She showed she understood the question and could repeat the answer in the textbook; she falls short of an A because her answer didn’t really have any particular originality or detail.
The crucial question, from a policy perspective, is “what will we do about cyberattacks in the future?”Clinton’s answer was: “We need to make it very clear — whether It’s Russia, China, Iran or anybody else — the United States has much greater capacity. And we are not going to sit idly by and permit state actors to go after our information, our private-sector information or our public-sector information.”This is basically right-headed. As an answer, it has two flaws though. First, it is not original: “we will respond when attacked”is our current policy. Second, it is too vague to engage with the hard parts of the problem. How hard will we hit back? And at whom? Many attacks come not from foreign governments but from private-sector actors with loose affiliations. Suppose we are attacked, not by the Russian government, but by private “activists”who have some degree of government patronage. How broadly do we retaliate? How do we distinguish between hackers friendly to the Russian government and Russian hackers who Putin assures us aren’t really his friends, but just sort of groupies for United Russia? Mrs. Clinton’s answer ignored the real depth of this topic.
Mr. Trump gets a D. He gives no evidence that he understood the question, let alone that he has thought about it. Much of his answer was irrelevant to the topic. It is commendable that Trump’s 10-year-old son is “so good with these computers, It’s unbelievable”; but unless we are going to appoint Barron Trump to senior government office, this is not relevant to national policy.
Trump lurched from talking about the problem of hacking by Russia and China, to the problem of ISIS on the internet. These are both problems, but they are largely unrelated. The problem posed by Russia and China is large-scale, unlawful access to American computer networks. The problem posed by ISIS is that fanatics and terrorists are able to communicate over the internet, and our intelligence services are unable to break into their computers to monitor or disrupt them. These are not only distinct problems but also point in opposite directions: to the extent that we make commercial US computer systems more resistant to penetration, we probably will have a harder time penetrating the computers used by ISIS sympathizers within the US. Reasonable people may disagree about the tradeoffs here, but Trump has given no hint that he even understands what is at stake.
The only thing that spares Trump from a failing grade is that he did manage to articulate one relevant fact, namely that attributing attacks is challenging. Trump is perfectly correct that we often will not know with perfect confidence whether an attack is from Russia, China, or “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds”– though the last of these has not previously been considered a major threat class. Moreover, even if the intelligence services believe they can attribute a particular attack, it may be impossible for them to explain how they know — attribution is something of a black art, and often relies on our own secret intelligence sources.
Lester Holt is to be applauded for spending scarce debate minutes on the topic of cybersecurity. It’s important, It’s overlooked, and It’s a useful lens through which to view the candidates. Unlike many other areas of policy, the two parties have not calcified into warring camps. The basic facts are relatively undisputed, and to the extent that experts disagree, they do not break down on party lines. As a result, this is a topic where we can observe the candidates with unusual clarity. On this narrow topic, it was obvious which candidate was better informed and more articulate. This post was originally published on TechPolicyDaily.
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