IT Essentials: The power is the point

Trump’s grasp for power is destroying US cyber

In tearing down the old order, Donald Trump is exposing the world to new cyber threats.

Whenever we receive commentary on a developing story, it’s often wrapped in political language. “A terrible idea” becomes “a misjudgement,” “a devastating cyber attack” becomes “a security incident,” and “this is bonkers” becomes “against the current narrative.”

That’s why it was refreshing to receive some brutally honest comment this week on the USA’s apparent decision to halt offensive cyber operations against Russia. The commenter stressed the move makes the USA no safer, achieves no in-kind agreement and likened it to broadcasting military weakness during the Cold War.

Apologies for writing about US movements again – we are, after all, primarily a European site – but it's still the case that when America sneezes, Britain catches a cold; or in this case, a virus. A reduced American cyber threat will give Moscow the bandwidth to step up its operations against other targets.

The Trump administration has also disbanded an FBI task force focused on foreign influence campaigns and put CISA employees working on election security on leave.

Without mincing words, Trump and his cronies are dismantling the USA’s cyber capabilities en masse, echoing Elon Musk’s actions at Twitter two years ago. The media treated it as a joke then – “Elon’s tearing out everything that made the company successful, ho ho ho, he’ll learn his lesson soon” - but it turns out it was just practice.

We in the tech media have seen this before. How often has a massive tech firm campaigned against regulation or free speech protections in the name of innovation? How often have they profited from the same? It doesn’t take long before you can spot the pattern.

The same thing is happening in the US government, which is being weakened under the flag of efficiency. Ditching bureaucracy isn’t the point: it's all about the power grab.

This is never going to lead to a more business-friendly environment, except maybe in the very short term. Businesses needs certainty, and the USA’s stable economic environment has allowed innovation to thrive. We’re already seeing the start of the brain drain to other regions.

This story affects everyone but what, as a European IT leader, can you do?

For starters, you could join the small but growing number of your peers looking outside the USA for their tech stack. This week we wrote about a new research report by consulting CTO Mark Ridley, looking at whether it was even possible – let alone viable – to build a non-US stack.

The answer is yes, with a lot of caveats. Read the article to find out how and why.

At Computing we’re still committed to covering UK and European tech, while our sister site MES Computing covers North America, and you can see plenty of that in our Recommended Reads section this week; but, while the news coming out of the USA continues to have ramifications for the world, we’ll keep writing about it.