Central European University
Andrea Servida, deputy head of the Internet, Network and Information Security Unit of the European Commission
This week I have been participating in the European Science Foundation’s workshop “Europe and the Global Information Society Revisited: Developing a Network of Scholars and Agenda for Social Science Research on Cyber Security.” The event in Budapest, Hungary, has brought together policy analysts, government people and legal scholars to talk about the cybersecurity issue.
This is different. Usually cybersecurity is something for the computer scientists and software developers to worry about. The bad news is that they have not found the technical fix for all of the e-mail phishing, denial of service and data breach problems that make the papers with increasing frequency. We’re talking about how to break down some of the complexity of the issue and begin figuring out how to build research that confronts the cybersecurity problem from an interdisciplinary perspective, not simply a technical one.
When I wrote my Ph.D. on cybersecurity policy at the beginning of the decade, it was viewed as pretty unusual. Now many more social science grad students are thinking about cyber as their topic of research. The paradigm of what is important for social research is changing. Part of that is happening here in Budapest, a short ride down the Danube from where Austro-Hungarian philosopher Karl Popper thought about how research paradigms change. The Internet matters, and its not just about bits and bytes any more.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in technology, society and public policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington, D.C.