Greetings, Future Tensers,
Late Friday, WikiLeaks released a cache of almost 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee, a trove that included a great deal of personally identifying information. While it’s difficult to definitively attribute cyberattacks like this one, evidence increasingly suggests that Russia was responsible. Laura K. Bate of the Cybersecurity Initiative at New America outlines six ways that the United States might respond, from sanctions to retaliation to doing nothing at all. (Disclosure: New America is a partner with Slate and Arizona State University in Future Tense.) That last choice would be a problematic one, though: If the U.S. chooses not to act, Bate warns, it risks setting “a very dangerous precedent.”
The safest move, of course, is to not get hacked in the first place, in which case, two-factor authentication is still your best bet. Nevertheless, recent research indicates that authentication by text message is much less secure than we’d like to believe. Even if you avoid that, one way or another, hacking happens, which is why cybersecurity expert Josephine Wolff argues that the DNC shouldn’t have even been maintaining its own email server. While an individual Gmail account can be breached, Wolff writes, it’s much harder to grab data from a whole organization’s correspondence, which is what appears to have happened here.
Here are some of the other stories that we read while waiting for chip card charges to go through:
- Racism: To evaluate a group of people based on their inventions is to misunderstand how innovation happens—and how credit tends to get assigned.
- Dead Media: The VCR, which had a 40-year run, is finally going out of production. A scholar of the technology explores its legacy.
- Complexity: Samuel Arbesman discusses the difficulty of understanding modern technology—and thinks about how we can model those systems to help us understand them better.
- Bioethics: Gene-drive technology allows scientists to meddle with the ordinary probabilities of genetic inheritance. Are we doing enough to control it?
Jacob Brogan
for Future Tense
