By Underwriting the June 8 Intelligence Squared Event, Neustar Presents a Much-Needed, Much-Appreciated “Public Service”
Last week’s Intelligence Squared debate “The Cyber War Threat Has Been Grossly Exaggerated” changed minds, shattered preconceived notions and hammered home many salient points about the ever-evolving nature of malicious online activity. The debate was presented at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and Neustar was responsible for coaxing Intelligence Squared to leave its home in New York for the first time ever to come to the Nation’s Capitol.
Marc Rotenberg (executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center) and Bruce Schneier (renowned security technologist) framed the threat as a campaign by the U.S. government and the military to control the Internet. Mike McConnell (former vice admiral in the United States Navy) and Jonathan Zittrain (professor of law at Harvard University) countered with what they considered a “realistic” appraisal of cyber war – one that in no way involved America becoming a police state. With the audience ultimately deciding which team carried the day, McConnell and Zittrain emerged victorious, winning over 70% of attendees’ votes in the final tally. (The debate can be seen in its entirety here on Neustar’s corporate website.)
James Fallows, writing about the Newseum event in The Atlantic , said: “It’s a real public service to have debates of this sort that bring top-tier participants together and add the sizzle of prize fight competition to a discussion of issues of first-order importance.”
As a company, we are proud to have made possible this “public service,” and Neustar’s enthusiastic support for the debate also underscores how important we know cyber security is for our company going forward. When you add them all together — from web queries to telephone calls — Neustar may well be the world’s leader in connecting “endpoints.” We connect people to people, and people to their favorite content, a billion times a day. Neustar already provides an essential role in providing critical Internet infrastructure services, and protecting this “network of networks” is a natural growth area for the company. We even have on our team the renowned cyber security expert Rodney Joffe, who heads the international Conficker Working Group. Rodney is a highly sought-after thought leader on cyber security, and was called “one of the few people on the planet who knows how the Internet really works” in a recent story on China’s hijacking of web traffic that appeared in Forbes .
There may still be a great deal of contention as to what “cyber war” actually means – and to be sure, a one-hour debate is hardly enough time to suss it out – but from Neustar’s perspective, the dialogue itself is absolutely essential. As all four debaters would no doubt assert, online threats are real, and they loom large every day.
To view the Intelligence Squared debate in its entirety, as well as video excerpts from each presenter, click here .
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