The Future of Values in Cyber Security Strategies

While national cyber security strategies have proliferated worldwide in the past decade, most have been overwhelmingly focused on resilience at the expense of political values. This paper addresses the challenges that have arisen from an overly technical focus on cyber security that has failed to consider the application of value sets in strategy creation.

Summary

The efforts and public expenditures that have been committed to the pursuit of cyber security in the past decade are no doubt vast. In numerous nations these efforts have included the creation of several iterations of national cyber security strategy to guide public efforts. Despite such investment of both public monies as well as intellectual and policy capital however, it would be difficult to claim that the state of cyber security is much improved.

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Indeed, even subject experts and seasoned professionals within cyber security will be quickly overwhelmed with the available data reported by numerous outlets on the pernicious and ever-growing volume of cybercrime worldwide. In the face of conflicting real-world evidence of a problem that is barely improving, a hard question must be asked: do our national cyber security strategies carry flaws?

This author contests that this is the case, arguing that our present strategies have been overly focused on technological matters and establishing national resilience, to the detriment of values establishment that would aid the development of normative behaviour. With the scale of cyber security challenges faced by nations, and the lack of consensus internationally to temper the geopolitical future of cyberspace, a concerted drive in values assertion is a missing element of cyber security strategies that should be taken seriously.