Securing the Digital Republic

Cybersecurity has emerged as one of the defining policy challenges of the twenty-first century. From ransomware attacks on businesses and schools to hacks into our critical infrastructure, from virtual political influence operations to large-scale fraud and nefarious data collection by corporations and state actors, cybersecurity has become an indelible concern of contemporary life.

Adversarial states view cyberspace as an arena for strategic competition below the threshold of conventional warfare. China’s formidable espionage capabilities have been successfully directed at governments and businesses alike; Iranian malware has compromised critical American infrastructure; Russia’s attacks on the Ukrainian grid have demonstrated that cyber operations can augment hard power on the battlefield.

Simultaneously, advances in artificial intelligence have dramatically accelerated the scale and complexity of cybercrime, lowering barriers for attacks while increasing pressure on government and industry to invest in burdensome protections absent a federally coordinated strategy.

Despite these swelling challenges, many of the United States’ digital vulnerabilities are still gaping. Our critical infrastructure functions on half-century-old industrial systems that were not designed for a lawless and hostile cyber environment. Economic incentives encourage the collection and monetization of personal data despite the magnitude of associated risks. Americans face an increasingly sophisticated ecosystem of fraud that exploits technological openness faster than our political institutions can respond. Each of these emergencies compels us to ask whether our digital infrastructure is governed in the public interest or by exploitable commercial incentives misaligned with the common good.

The essays in this symposium examine these interconnected challenges from a range of complementary perspectives, exploring both the sources of the United States’ growing digital vulnerabilities and the policy choices available to address them. In a world of overabundant information, national security threats are discovered by Justin Sherman and Gavin Wilde at the intersection of data collection and counterintelligence. Emerson T. Brooking examines foreign influence on social media platforms, finding gaping legislative inadequacies in the protection of our national discourse. Amid a vastly more complex threat environment, Joshua Steinman makes the case for heightened security and vigilance at America’s industrial firms. Lars Erik Schönander, Josh Levine, and Adam Gluck forecast the mounting cybersecurity risks facing America’s critical infrastructure, arguing that operational technology systems have become vulnerable to state-backed campaigns assisted by advanced AI. Haiman Wong addresses the lucrative industry of global fraud and online scams relentlessly targeting ordinary Americans. Lastly, Matt Stoller reviews Sarah Wynn-Williams’s Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (Flatiron Books, 2025), using the memoir as a lens through which to examine the evolution of Meta and the political economy of Big Tech.

Taken together, these essays reveal that cybersecurity is no longer a question of defending corporate networks from hackers or maintaining counterintelligence procedures. It has grown to encompass the basic protection of our society at large. Ensuring our digital systems do not endanger but serve the public interest will require new approaches that bridge cybersecurity, economic policy, and national security. We hope the essays collected here contribute to a more complete understanding of the policy choices that lie ahead.