President Barack Obama talks about National Security Agency surveillance, Friday, Jan. 17, 2014, at the Justice Department in Washington.
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It would be impossible to defend against these attacks without allowing intelligence agencies to spy on foreign governments and groups abroad. But it is also crucial that the NSA and others have some ability to enter into telecommunications systems at home to track cyberattacks, figure out where they come from and render them ineffective. Former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith notes that the New York Times objects to foreign cyberattacks yet wants the NSA to shut down its surveillance at home. In fact, he writes in the New Republic, "To keep our computer and telecommunication networks secure, the government will eventually need to monitor and collect intelligence on those networks using techniques similar to ones the Times and many others find reprehensible when done for counterterrorism ends."
We all live, bank, work and play in a new parallel world of computer identities, data and transactions. But we do not seem to realize that this enormous freedom of activity in the cyberworld, as in the real world, has to be defended. Just as the police need basic information about your life and activities, the government will need information about the cyberworld. As General Keith Alexander, the NSA's director, has pointed out, there is no way to defend these systems without getting into them in the first place.
In "Federalist No. 51," father of the American Constitution James Madison wrote (along with Alexander Hamilton) that in setting up a government, "the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." That is the balance we have to strike, in cyberspace as anywhere else.
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