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Dear friends, 

I was honored last week to deliver a keynote address on cybersecurity at the Brookings Institution. In recapping the event, the Washington Post summed up the United States’ current situation in its headline:Cybersecurity and the missing sense of urgency. Most disappointingly, we have failed to enact comprehensive reforms required to make our laws and practices relevant to the 21st-cetnury.
 
Too often, policymakers still view this as a niche area and that perspective gets communicated to the public at large. In fact, cybersecurity affects everyone in all sectors of society. We rely on the Internet tremendously, whether to store personal files and sensitive government information, or to carry out financial transactions and execute business plans. Yet security is not a high priority. If someone were hauling off filing cabinets of sensitive information, including national secrets, the personal records of millions of Americans and private research, that would be tantamount to an act of war. But because it’s happening in the digital realm, there is little public outrage.
 
Meanwhile, the biggest victim is our economy. As I mentioned at Brookings, a 2010 study found the average cost of a data breach for a business to be $7.2 million and the intellectual property losses are staggering.  Top cyber expert Jim Lewis noted earlier this year that “the US spent $368 billion on research and development last year, but cyber espionage lets others get the results for free.”
 
The absence of key security measures is perhaps most distressing among those who operate our nation’s critical infrastructure: the electric grid, water and sewage plants, and the financial and telecommunications systems. We know computer viruses exist that could devastate parts of these industries, resulting in enormous costs to repair the damage, borne in part by the taxpayer.
 
We need a better understanding that cybersecurity is not an isolated topic. It has an integral role in all of our most pressing issues, particularly economic ones. I invite you to read the proposals I made at Brookings about how to finally address longknown shortcomings.
 
Please do not hesitate to send me your feedback on this and other issues. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Jim Langevin