SSP Wednesday Seminar Series, with speaker Chappell Lawson, MIT Political Science Department

The last two decades have revealed the vulnerability of privately owned “critical infrastructure” – the power grid, pipelines, financial networks, and other vital systems – to cyberattack. The central U.S. government response to this challenge has been a series of sectoral “partnerships” with private owner-operators of critical infrastructure, involving varying degrees of regulation. Qualitative analysis based on in-depth interviews with three dozen policymakers and senior private sector managers, as well as public available documents, reveals considerable variation across sectors in how well this approach has worked, with major implications for policy and public administration on civilian cybersecurity.