New McAfee/CSIS Report on Cybercrime
I participated today in a CSIS/McAfee roll-out of their latest report on the economic impact of cybercrime. Their bottom line is that cybercrime has an annual effect of roughly $455 billion globally, with 200K jobs lost in the US alone as a result. A nice summary of the report by the Washington Post is
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I participated today in a CSIS/McAfee roll-out of their latest report on the economic impact of cybercrime. Their bottom line is that cybercrime has an annual effect of roughly $455 billion globally, with 200K jobs lost in the US alone as a result. A nice summary of the report by the Washington Post is available here, and the video of the event will eventually be available on the CSIS website. My own two cents, for what they are worth:
- The report convincingly demonstrates that data quality in this area is very poor and highly variable across the globe. There is not even a universal definition of cybercrime (one Chinese questioner made an effort to expand it to include theft for national espionage purposes, naturally). Governments have a good role to play as data collectors -- we cant make good policy without good data.
- I think the report underestimates the actual losses---at least in part because of the difficulty of valuing theft of intellectual property and because of the spottiness of the data.
- Fundamentally, the problem can't be addressed as a traditional crime problem because a large fraction of the criminality is "state-tolerated" or even supported crime (unlike, say, murder). Thus traditional models of criminal deterrence are only partially useful, and more attention needs to be paid to broader strategic approaches to successful deterrence of state action.
Paul Rosenzweig is the founder of Red Branch Consulting PLLC, a homeland security consulting company and a Senior Advisor to The Chertoff Group. Mr. Rosenzweig formerly served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Department of Homeland Security. He is a Professorial Lecturer in Law at George Washington University, a Senior Fellow in the Tech, Law & Security program at American University, and a Board Member of the Journal of National Security Law and Policy.
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