How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Brother

Well, maybe not “love” exactly, but at least peacefully coexist and accept the new realities of privacy and security in the digital era (apologies to Dr. Strangelove).

I can’t verify it, but I’m fairly sure that the first fictional account of cyberterrorism was in Theodore Tyler’s comic novel The Man Whose Name Wouldn’t Fit. It was published in 1968, long before anyone thought of coining a word like “cyberterrorist”; back during the days when computers were programmed using punch cards and data was stored on magnetic tape.

The book’s protagonist, one Albert Duane Cartwright-Chickering, is a corporate executive who is forced into early retirement. It seems his name is one character too long to fit the available slots on the punch cards used by his company’s new computer system. Outraged, he finds and plots with other digitally disenfranchised individuals to strike back. They develop an organism that rapidly degrades magnetic tape and introduce it into the supply of oils used to lubricate the tape drives (the first computer virus?). The result is chaos, as banks and corporations lose their records, transportation grinds to a halt, government systems breakdown… you get the idea. And this was when universities, major corporations and the government were the only entities with the wherewithal to employ data processing systems.

How does this relate to marketing or advertising? Well, it does and it doesn’t, but I’ll get to that later. First, however, there are a few points I’d like to make about the world as it was in 1968 and how it stands today, 45 years later. When Tyler wrote his novel, the preeminent challenge to world safety was a nuclear holocaust being set off by tensions between the US and USSR — a supremely physical threat. It’s no accident that, when old Albert Duane decides to take on “the machine”, his attack is also a physical one. This was a decidedly “meat-space” world, and people addressed things in physical ways.

Welcome to 2013. Physical threats to our security still exist; in fact, they abound. Chemical weapons, engineered diseases, pressure-cooker bombs and the like are legitimate concerns, but most of us aren’t building the survivalist bunkers in our backyards. It isn’t that we fail to see these threats as credible; we just don’t perceive them as global or apocalyptic in nature the way we did nuclear war. They are frightening in the hands of a terrorist, but that, by its nature, is a limited threat. Cyber attacks are not; they can be practiced on any scale. And while the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction kept the superpowers from incinerating the planet, there is no equivalent specter of reprisal to deter a cyber attack.

President Obama has stated that, “Cyber threat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.” Cyber attacks originating from China was a dominant topic of discussion between Obama and Chinese President, Xi Jinping, during Xi’s visit to Washington in June. Later that month, the FDA notified medical-device manufacturers of the need to fortify their equipment against cyber attacks that could compromise patient information or lead to dangerous malfunctions, and the Pentagon has requested $4.7 billion for something called “cyberspace operations” (shades of Tron?). Our government takes cybersecurity very seriously; the question is, do we?

It’s no secret that American business relies increasingly on data and information technology. Finance and manufacturing were the obvious early adopters, but recent years have witnessed the rapid penetration of IT into distribution, marketing and advertising as the Internet and social media became woven into the fabric of daily life. While we are still a long way from seeing brick-and-mortar commerce disappear, a large and growing portion of marketing, sales and distribution today is conducted and coordinated entirely online. And with the emergence of “Big Data” the amount of detailed personal information on each of us that resides on commercial servers far outstrips anything the NSA has, or would care to have. And it is infinitely less secure.

The discomforting truth is that commerce in America and the rest of the developed world is frighteningly vulnerable to cyber attack. Not a huge threat coming from a disgruntled geek living in his mother’s basement, but potentially devastating if directed by a terrorist organization or unfriendly nation. Are governments prepared to deploy such “weapons”? Let’s not forget the cyber attack that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear program. That was us… and we’re the good guys.

So, is there anything we as marketers and business people can do to protect our burgeoning digital infrastructure? There really isn’t. We are no more capable of warding off a national-scale cyber attack than we were the physical threats of nuclear destruction during the Cold War. These are issues that can only be addressed on the national level.

What has been lost in all the handwringing over the recent revelations about the NSA’s access to telephone and Internet data is the simple fact that the wall between the digital and physical worlds no longer exists. Surfing the Internet and using cellular service are as public as walking down Main Street, and any expectation of privacy is an illusion. Besides, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft already have more personal data on you and me than the NSA, but that somehow that doesn’t seem to bother us.

As disquieting as it may be, effective cybersecurity is as necessary for us today as having an army to protect our borders, or a police force patrolling our local streets. The Internet is no longer just a means of communication, but a critical part of our economic infrastructure. Even its temporary loss would cripple the nation’s commerce. Will we, as individuals or corporations, need to cede some aspects of privacy to gain the necessary level of protection? Except for those willing to exit the grid for the digital equivalent of moving to an isolated cabin in the woods, it’s not really a question–we already have.