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Promoting international norm development in cybersecurity

From hacks of some of the world’s largest corporations (think Target, Home Depot), to critical vulnerabilities in widely used open source software like Heartbleed and Shellshock, to connected carmakers being woefully unprepared to identify and mitigate attacks, to companies like Sony exercising bad security hygiene even after previously suffering a major attack, the challenges to securing the internet and those who use it have never seemed greater.

Yet, none of these examples or many of the other exploits that have dominated the public imagination in recent years align with traditional government cyber security paradigms. To contribute to developing a more informed public debate in this arena, the Freedom Online Coalition, a group of 26 countries publicly committed to supporting global internet freedom, set up a multistakeholder working group on an “Internet Free and Secure,” of which I’m a member.

In addition to ongoing efforts to map where cybersecurity policy discussions are happening (with an eye to facilitating greater multistakeholder involvement) and developing normative recommendations, the working group also publishes long-form blogs on pertinent issues. Click here to see the latest edition co-authored by Senior Policy Officer for Internet Freedom at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs Simone Halink and me. In the post, we discuss the Global Conference on Cyber Space (GCCS), the world’s largest interministerial meeting on cybersecurity, and explore how international policy debates on cybersecurity need to evolve and improve in order to meet today’s challenges. The GCCS is taking place April 16 and 17 in the Hague, and Senior Vice President for Business and Legal Affairs Denelle Dixon-Thayer and I will be there to represent Mozilla.

Read the full post here.