The United States defined its preferred cyberspace norms—Internet openness, security, liberty, free speech, and with minimal government oversight and surveillance—in its 2011 International Strategy for Cyberspace. Although the United States has had little success so far in establishing norms against commercial espionage in cyberspace, it has had some early gains with the recognition that international law applies to state activity in cyberspace and that human rights protections that apply offline also apply online.
These efforts to define shared norms have been accompanied by a process of norm promotion that suffered a significant setback in the summer of 2013 with the Snowden disclosures. The U.S. government should reinvigorate its efforts to spread and encourage the adoption of its preferred norms with the following steps:
- reform U.S. intelligence activities to make them more consistent with the publicly expressed norms of Internet openness that the United States is trying to establish;
- disclose more convincing evidence when trying to shame actors that do not abide by cybersecurity norms; and
- encourage other states and civil society actors to take a leading role in norm promotion—even when this cuts against U.S. interests.
Download the full brief from the Council on Foreign Relations.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:04/06/2015