High-Profile Hacks Are Making Privacy Experts Nervous
In the wake of big security breaches, “law enforcement tends to always want more information.”
Hi, this is Alyza. Cybersecurity is often difficult to balance with privacy. More government visibility into user behavior might mean we catch attackers faster, but it also exposes innocent peoples' data. Now, after a spate of sprawling hacks that have been linked to China and Russia, privacy experts are worried that the U.S. government's response will fall too close to the security side of the scale.
Top American officials have argued that the country’s privacy laws, which protect domestic networks from surveillance, were partly to blame for officials' failure to spot the SolarWinds Corp. cyber-attack. That hacking campaign infiltrated approximately nine government agencies and 100 private sector companies. Critically, the attackers used U.S. infrastructure to carry out the hacks, staying mostly hidden from view until a private security firm reported a breach.