Report by Council on Foreign Affairs Task Force: “…The Task Force proposes three pillars to a foreign policy that should guide Washington’s adaptation to today’s more complex, variegated, and dangerous cyber realm.
First, Washington should confront reality and consolidate a coalition of allies and friends around a vision of the internet that preserves—to the greatest degree possible—a trusted, protected international communication platform.
Second, the United States should balance more targeted diplomatic and economic pressure on adversaries, as well as more disruptive cyber operations, with clear statements about self-imposed restraint on specific types of targets agreed to among U.S. allies.
Third, the United States needs to put its own proverbial house in order. That requirement calls for Washington to link more cohesively its policy for digital competition with the broader enterprise of national security strategy.
The major recommendations of the Task Force are as follows:
- Build a digital trade agreement among trusted partners.
- Agree to and adopt a shared policy on digital privacy that is interoperable with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- Resolve outstanding issues on U.S.-European Union (EU) data transfers.
- Create an international cybercrime center.
- Launch a focused program for cyber aid and infrastructure development.
- Work jointly across partners to retain technology superiority.
- Declare norms against destructive attacks on election and financial systems.
- Negotiate with adversaries to establish limits on cyber operations directed at nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) systems.
- Develop coalition-wide practices for the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP).
- Adopt greater transparency about defend forward actions.
- Hold states accountable for malicious activity emanating from their territories.
- Make digital competition a pillar of the national security strategy.
- Clean up U.S. cyberspace by offering incentives for internet service providers (ISPs) and cloud providers to reduce malicious activity within their infrastructure.
- Address the domestic intelligence gap.
- Promote the exchange of and collaboration among talent from trusted partners.
- Develop the expertise for cyber foreign policy.
A free, global, and open internet was a worthy aspiration that helped guide U.S. policymakers for the internet’s first thirty years. The internet as it exists today, however, demands a reconsideration of U.S. cyber and foreign policies to confront these new realities. The Task Force believes that U.S. goals moving forward will be more limited and thus more attainable, but the United States needs to act quickly to design strategies and tactics that can ameliorate an urgent threat…(More)”.