Cybersecurity: A Pre-history

The 'cyber' issue is not new, but rather has taken a half-century to develop. Indeed, it was already decades old before the general public and many senior leaders recognized its salience in the mid-1990s. It developed, moreover, along a logical path, which can be depicted as the successive dawning (for American policymakers, officials, and intelligence officers) of four insights, each of which was glimpsed in theory at least shortly before empirical evidence verified that it was indeed a reality to consider in setting policies, standards, and doctrine. Thus the official responses to the emergence of the cyber issue in the late-1990s were shaped by the outcomes of those earlier debates; the options available to policy-makers in the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, and the various agencies were already conditioned and even determined by previous arguments.