Digital Equilibrium Project

In 2016, a group of privacy and cybersecurity advocates came together to ask a simple question: How can we achieve the interests of both?

Convened at the behest of former RSA Chairman Art Coviello, Jr., the group began with the proposition that the digital world is different from anything we’ve ever experienced. Among its participants: Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary and executive chairman of The Chertoff Group; Michael McConnell, former director of the NSA and the former director of national intelligence; Richard Clarke, former White House cybersecurity advisor; and, Nuala O’Connor, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

The project is an effort to cast off old, binary ways of thinking about security and privacy in favor of new, holistic approaches to building the laws, policies and structures for inhabiting this new dimension peaceably, happily, and prosperously.

As the paper notes,

The physics of the digital world are different from anything we’ve ever experienced. They ignore national borders. They smash together cultures, ages, continents, kids, adults, criminals, spies, and geniuses into one global mosh pit, where laws, morals and politics fuse in ways we never could have imagined a few years ago.

We are unprepared for it. But we are charging ahead anyway, because humans explore, innovate, and execute. It is what we do.

Download the project’s foundational paper: Advancing The Dialogue on Privacy and Security in the Connected World (pdf)