David Eide – Opinion Columnist

Last Thursday saw the arrest of Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts National Guard who had leaked a large amount of classified military documents to his Discord server for internet clout. I had been following the story of the Discord document leaks for a while and the fact that the culprit was literally the same age as I piqued my interest even more and got me thinking about data security more generally. The last decade has seen a number of high-profile data breaches: the release of NSA documents by Edward Snowden, the Russian hacking and release of Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 elections, to the recent hack of Minneapolis Public Schools information for use as blackmail material. These examples are just what came to mind immediately and represent only a small fraction of data security failures, indeed it seems like every other day you hear about some new hacking that has compromised the information of a huge amount of people. I would like to examine the idea of data security and how it interacts with the ever-increasing digitization of more and more aspects of our lives.

Data security has been a concept for a long time, essentially for as long as there was information that you didn’t want other people to know. However, in the past this was mostly limited to things like state secrets or military movements rather than the foundations of our lives such as our personal information or communications.  This all changed with the advent of the internet and the resulting movement of much of our personal information online. Previously, if you wanted to break into someone’s bank account, you would’ve had to pull off some complicated con to gain access. Now all you have to do is exploit some flaw in one of the numerous websites linked to that account in order to access someone’s life savings. The same is true for communications that you might not want to be shared with the general public. In the past, these were usually kept in secure locations, to the point where gaining access to them would have constituted several different crimes on top of theft whereas now all it takes is someone on their computer figuring out your Gmail password. 

In effect, the switch to online has made us more vulnerable to having our information potentially stolen, representing a trade-off between convenience and data safety. This is compounded by the fact that more and more critical information has been moved online, from medical records to government secrets. A malicious hacker hacking the right entities could theoretically piece together a timeline of your life from your birth to your high school GPA to the results of your last physical and I find that somewhat unsettling. There have already been several instances in my life where the passwords to my accounts on various websites showed up in some massive data breach or another and I’m sure that has been the case for many of you reading this as well. For those who are aware of this issue, there can be no peace of mind, only constant vigilance in the form of frequent password changes and duo-factor authentication. 

This is a fascinating conundrum to me because it’s clear that there is no going back to the way things used to be so we thus need to find some way to adapt to the fact that our private information can be so easily stolen. I’ve seen some people put forth blockchain technology as a potential solution to this issue but looking at how many major cryptocurrency scams and frauds have gone on recently, I don’t think that is remotely viable. Quantum computing is also touted as a way to guarantee the security of information due to the particular nature of the mechanics involved at the quantum scale. At the moment however, quantum computing is still a ways off from reaching everyday consumers so we’ll have to see how the technology develops in the coming decade before it can provide the answer to our data security woes. Looking for a technological fix for the issue is the wrong way to think about the issue in my opinion. At this point, it seems like we just have to accept that we live in an age of insecurity where our data and our very identities can be stolen by a random individual or group that might live hundreds of miles away. It’s a major adjustment but it’s either that or we just stop using computers and the internet entirely, which is something that I am not willing to do. Whether it be duo-factor authentication or insanely long passwords, the best we can do at this point is cope with this increased exposure and hope someone comes along with the next big encryption advance to restore some sense of security to interacting with online spaces.