Nowhere to Hide: Data, Cyberspace, and the Dangers of the Digital World

Andrew Burt

For as long as software has been relied upon, officials and researchers alike have been sounding alarm bells about the vulnerability of all our data—sometimes comically, but nonetheless gravely. Here, for example, is how one Congressional report described the issue of data security: "If architects built buildings the way programmers build programs, then the first woodpecker to appear would destroy civilization." This was in 1989.

Here’s how the head of the Central Intelligence Agency described a variation of the same problem: “We are staking our future on a resource that we have not yet learned to protect.” This was in 1998.

Examples of these types of warnings are not hard to find—not because such prognostications require such foresight, but because it is not all that hard to be right about the risks of digital technologies. Their dangers are plentiful, and we use them more and more.

Yet layered underneath all our profound privacy and security vulnerabilities, there are also three much less obvious effects of these trends, which form the basis of my new whitepaper, Nowhere to Hide: Data, Cyberspace and the Dangers of the Digital World, the first of new Digital Future Whitepaper Series published by the Yale Information Society Project today. These three trends are as follows: Privacy is dead. So is trust. And you’re not who you think you are.

After I overview each trend, I make a handful of concrete suggestions about what we can and should do to address each development—as lawyers, as policymakers, and as citizens around the world. The sky may seem like it is falling in cyberspace, I will argue, and with good reason, but it need not fall as fast nor land as hard.

Andrew Burt is a Visiting Fellow of the Information Society Project, Managing Partner at bnh.ai and Chief Legal Officer at Immuta. You can reach him by e-mail at burt at aya.yale.edu