In the article, “Social Cybersecurity: An Emerging National Security Requirement” the authors, David Beskow and Kathleen Carley, discuss cybersecurity and the consequences that come with the forever changing discipline. The main theme of the article was how technology is creating problems that we as a society have never seen before. Things that once seemed like it would be impossible to figure out are now possible to do with technology. 

While reading the article, I found many topics that were discussed interesting. One of the subcategories that really caught my attention was decentralization. In this part, the authors bring up how decentralized information flow has become. Before it was governments, organizations and news outlets that controlled the information that was put out, but now anyone who has access to the internet and a computer can easily put out any information that they want to (Beskow and Carley). This is dangerous, particularly to those who grew up with a more centralized information flow, because they aren’t used to doing the fact checking for themselves. I thought that this topic was interesting because I never really thought about why older people didn’t fact-check the news articles that they see on the internet. It never really occurred to me that when they were growing up, they didn’t have to fact-check. 

I think that the article brought up many interesting points about cybersecurity and technology and their connections to humans. It was nice to read about different issues that come with cybersecurity and technology. I feel like when discussing cybersecurity, we usually only talk about the business side of things and not how it affects the average person. We never talk about how barriers like geography previously affected how we got information and how easy it is now with technology. 

Work Cited

Beskow, David, and Kathleen Carley. “Social Cybersecurity An Emerging National Security Requirement.” Army University Press, 2019, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/Mar-Apr-2019/117-Cybersecurity/b/. Accessed 24 November 2022.