The Road Not Taken: U.S. Cybersecurity Policy and Foreign Information Operations

• In Event: Text Analysis in Foreign Policy

Abstract

Following the Russian influence campaign in the 2016 United States presidential elections, concerns over cyber-enabled information operations have intensified in the country. Officials and analysts have warned that the U.S. needs a clear and cohesive set of policies and strategies to counter this type of operation. Despite the importance of this topic, we know little about why the United States has struggled with the formulation of a cyber policy to counter cyber-enabled foreign information operations. I argue that the convergence of different policy coalitions toward a shared cybersecurity narrative explains this policy failure. This narrative drew the attention of target audiences to hardware and software exploitation instead of information manipulation. Using computational text analysis, I examine a corpus of congressional hearings to investigate how policy narratives about cybersecurity threats were constructed in the United States between 1990 and 2016. The available evidence suggests that these narratives have a path-dependence effect on how actors define cybersecurity threats and set the foreign-policy agenda toward this issue.

Author

• Marcelo Leal, University of Massachusetts, Amherst