Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting Silicon Valley this week to recruit Big Tech in crafting a stronger, more cyber-focused national security strategy, the Wall Street Journal reports. It is the latest in a series of moves going back to the Trump Administration to put more emphasis on the digital and cyber realms of national security.
Big Tech has occupied a precarious space in American society for some time now, showing a willingness to advance U.S. and Western interests in certain arenas, such as assisting the Ukrainian cause against Vladimir Putin’s invasion; but the industry has invited broad distrust for its often duplicitous, inconsistent, and frustrating approach to content moderation—particularly around political content.
The Biden Administration’s intent on making cybersecurity more central to the National Security Strategy is apparent in its recently released, and long-awaited, official strategy document. “Digital” and “cyber” are mentioned a combined fifty-plus times in the Strategy, almost as often as China (nearly sixty times), Russia (at least seventy mentions), and climate (more than sixty times).
Despite the new focus on the digital realm, it is clear that the Administration has a lot of convincing to do. Following the State Department’s formation of a cyberspace and digital policy bureau earlier this year, almost half of its first budget of $41.2 million was for diplomatic purposes, according to WSJ ($18.2 million to be precise). Given the natural competition within the tech sector, an industry-wide consensus may prove elusive. And that does not begin to account for the variance in digital policy one can expect across America’s allies.
Meanwhile, repressive regimes such as China and Iran are tightening their grip on digital expression at a breakneck pace and Chinese innovation continues to catch up with the West. U.S. efforts to develop Western-based 5G infrastructure, begun in earnest during the Trump Administration, may prove too little, too late to challenge the Chinese-made 5G network from Huawei. The WSJ says that, according to Nathaniel Fick, the State Department’s new head of cyber and digital policy, “U.S. tech companies and allied nations want to work together but lack alternatives to Huawei.”
Diplomacy does take time to bear fruit, but the clock is ticking.
