Last Generation Legislators Trying to Solve Next Generation Security Issues

As we all know, Cybercrime has been rising precipitously, and the criminals and nation-states are becoming more and more sophisticated in their abilities to use the internet to carry out their criminal activities. We have always had an issue with technology outpacing regulation. Today legislation is struggling to keep up, and it has governments being forced to rethink their approach to the control of the technology sectors. With new devices hitting the shelves daily, it is hard to remember the time when they did not exist. With every innovation come more questions about how to secure our information. Is it possible for our legislators operate in a complex environment that is incoherent to most of us then you combine that with the average age of 66, our legislature will have difficulty conceptualizing what actions need to be taken to keep pace? As their level of understanding of technology is limited, they often resort to clumsily cobbling together old lethargic and unwieldy technocratic regulatory legislation filled with prior knowledge and assumptions.  Applying it to today’s issues creates more problems and, at best temporary solutions that often end in court battles. Trying to legislate from a post-WWII command and control structure will not be accepted by our rapidly evolving technologically adept society, and any attempt to force legislative crackdowns on our technological freedoms will backfire. Those technology innovators will move to jurisdictions where innovations are encouraged. Today we lack a set of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation, and this is due partly to their lack of understanding where they conflate the issues of privacy and cybersecurity as united. But they are different as night and day. One applies to the individual right to protect their information and the other to the manufacturer, developer, vendor, or supplier who needs to protect their systems and the data they create and store from being accessed, altered.