Technology & Trends

The technology to be discussed is preserving data authenticity/integrity.  The capacity to verify data is not corrupt following its creation is data authenticity (2021 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report® | Information Security Edition, 2021).  It has been pointed out that for the raw data to be of use, usually the process of cleaning the data, in a technical sense corrupts it.  The cleaning of data doesn't change what it originally portrayed, so the data's authenticity is not questionable.  Data integrity is considered intact when the data is cleaned by authorized personnel or systems, though as related earlier, technically the raw data authenticity is now in question (2021 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report® | Information Security Edition, 2021).  The most common data integrity issues are human-based.  There are also data integrity issues that result from system failures and natural disasters.  Future efforts to secure and preserve data authenticity/integrity rest on network and endpoint protection, administering standards and protocols that safeguard credentials, devices, and data (2021 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report® | Information Security Edition, 2021).  However, human behavior will decide these future efforts' success, as humans are the weak link regarding data authenticity/integrity.  

Two forces that impact preserving data authenticity/integrity are social and ethical.  The social force is the users who have access to and interact with the data.  Faroukhi, El Alaoui, & Amine (2020) postulate that the user dimension is the weakest link to be secured and the hardest to control in the cybersecurity cycle.  The social force mitigation will be through a cybersecurity culture of consciousness, validated and reinforced through the implementation of analytics and predictive tools that ensure users' behaviors comply with cybersecurity policies.  So, if appropriate mitigation is put in place, this force could facilitate data authenticity/integrity preservation.  The failure of users and mitigation strategies will negatively impact the preservation of data authenticity/integrity.  The ethical forces impacting preserving data authenticity/integrity are malicious entities.  Malicious entities can have an incentive that is financial, authoritarian, or destructive.  The is no up-side to the forces that malicious entities impose on preserving data authenticity/integrity; the actions are always detrimental.  

 

The trend of authoritarian surveillance will now be discussed.  The trend of authoritarian surveillance falls under the political trends section of the report.  The rationale for authoritarian surveillance becoming prominent is the resurgence of nationalistic ideology within countries and entities within nations to hold-on-to and further entrench their sphere of influence and power (2021 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report® | Information Security Edition, 2021).  The ability to influence and take power is enhanced through the exploitation of technologies and social media.  Furthermore, lack of congruence in regulations and laws spanning countries has hindered higher education and companies working together.  The European Union (EU) has put the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in place, specifying wide-ranging privacy regulations.  On the other hand, China is not a signatory to the EU GDPR and does not have a similar framework regarding controlling and safeguarding data (Zhao, Brewczyńska, & Chen, 2018). 

The force that potentially impacts authoritarian surveillance is technological, while the force authoritarian surveillance will impact societal/economical//local/national/global aspects.  The technological forces will be a continued enabler of authoritarian surveillance.  In China, an authoritarian country, surveillance technology started as a manual endeavor in the 1990s has evolved to the present day with an autonomous surveillance system that determines the freedom of movement based on the color code of an app (Brief, 2020).  The structure or framework of China's economic state is such that they are interweaved and separation of the two is not viable.  Chinese state capitalism bears many traits of all the other systems of capitalism, but the main difference is the monitoring of corporations and deep-seated interdependencies between the Communist Party and industry (Burnay, 2019).  The Chinese Party is an octopus with its tentacles at every layer of society and industry, which is ever-monitoring with its authoritarian surveillance.  At this point, the authoritarian surveillance is so deep-rooted in society that Chinese citizens don't know anything but it.  Because of the deep-rootedness that pervades the whole of China, authoritarian surveillance impacts society, economy, locally, nationally, and globally, ever-expanding to most likely having an eventual outsized influence.     

 

References

 

2021 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report® | Information Security Edition. (2021, February 16). Retrieved from Educase: https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2021/2/2021_horizon_report_infosec.pdf?la=en&hash=6F5254070245E2F4234C3FDE6AA1AA00ED7960FB

Brief, C. P. (2020). Designing Alternatives to China's Repressive Surveillance State.

Burnay, M. (2019). PRIVACY AND SURVEILLANCE IN A DIGITAL ERA: TRANSNATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF CHINA'S SURVEILLANCE STATE.

Faroukhi, A. Z., El Alaoui, I., Gahi, Y., & Amine, A. (2020). A Multi-Layer Big Data Value Chain Approach for Security Issues. Procedia Computer Science, 175, 737-744.

Zhao, B., Brewczyńska, M., & Chen, W. (2018). GDPR and China: What do we need to know.