To mark our five-year anniversary, the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) has produced a new report looking back on what we’ve achieved so far — and where we’re going.
“Five years ago, we launched CLTC with a mission to look over the horizon,” wrote Steve Weber and Ann Cleaveland, CLTC’s directors, in a letter introducing the report. “With the help of thinkers from a wide range of disciplines, we developed scenarios depicting diverse narratives for what cybersecurity might look in the year 2020, which at the time was an almost unimaginable five years away. The scenarios helped us identify key emerging issues—including predictive algorithms, the internet of things, and shifting attitudes about privacy—that have increasingly shaped our world. And while we didn’t get everything right, these long term insights have informed CLTC’s ambitious research, policy engagement, and education priorities.”
The goal in founding CLTC, Cleaveland and Weber write, was to “create a new kind of research center,” and to “’move the needle’ by broadening the aperture on cybersecurity and integrating technical research with research in the social sciences, law, and other domains. After all, as technologists often remind us, the human is often the weakest link in digital security— and in practice, the hardest to understand.”
The report provides an overview of some of the major highlights from our first five years:
- We launched the Citizen Clinic, which trains UC Berkeley students to provide cybersecurity assistance to civil society organizations that are at risk of politically motivated cyberattacks.
- We sponsored a first-of-its kind cybersecurity arts contest, as part of the Daylight Security Research Lab.
- We started the Artificial Intelligence Security Initiative, a research program to understand the global security implications of artificial intelligence.
- We’ve supported hundreds of talented cybersecurity researchers working across UC Berkeley through our grants program, funding dozens of CLTC-affiliated student researchers who have moved on to do important professional work at the front lines of cybersecurity policy and practice.
- We worked with the School of Information to help launch cybersecurity@berkeley, an online Master of Information and Cybersecurity degree program.
“The Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity has made important progress over the past five years, but our work is just getting started,” Weber and Cleaveland write. “We hope you’ll continue to join us as we keep reaching out toward the horizon for the next five years and beyond.”
