Connectedness
One of my clients is the Cyber Security Industry Association, a DC-area trade group made up of both software and hardware manufacturers whose businesses focus on making the Internet safe. The best known of the companies in the alliance are probably Symantec and McAfee, makers of anti-virus software among other products. With state legislatures around the country considering spyware legislation without the FTC even having a clear definition of what spyware is, CSIA wants to have more influence on the upcoming debate. Pineda Consulting won the bidding process to conduct a survey for CSIA, coming in $30,000 cheaper than one competitor for a poll with the same specifications.
Instead of the typical market research usually relied upon by the CEOs on the CSIA board, CSIA focused on likely voters in next year’s congressional elections. After all, one of the key targets for their efforts is the U.S. Congress, currently considering everything from whether there should be a cybersecurity czar to federal preemption of the states when it comes to consumer privacy protection. The polling results generated over 200 pieces of TV, radio, on-line and print coverage.
Among the findings that strike me as particularly noteworthy is the fact that 97 percent of likely voters think that identity theft is a serious problem - 83 percent think it’s a very serious problem. Another finding that stands out is that even in these partisan times, voter preferences on Internet policy are not drawn on party lines. For example, among Democratic voters, 79 percent believe that new laws need to be written to protect consumer privacy on the Internet compared to only 11 percent who think that existing laws are protection enough. Republican voters are a little less convinced, but even they are almost three times as likely as not to think that new laws need to be written (64 - 22 percent).
These findings suggest that issues like identity theft and cybersecurity will become an even bigger part of the political debate in the next 14 months.
For more information, feel free to peruse the following
memo…
http://pinedaconsulting.com/documents/congress.pdf
…and PowerPoint presentation (also in .pdf format)…
https://www.csialliance.org/resources/pdfs/CSIA_Internet_Security_Survey_Jun
e_2005.pdf
…both prepared by Pineda Consulting.
The work that CSIA does goes beyond just making your computer safe from viruses. The Executive Director, Paul Kurtz, and I have had discussions of the larger issue here: our ever-increasing connectedness, from information to electricity to most everything you can think of. How this connectedness relates to politics I will leave for a future post. Suffice to say for now that I’m glad smart people like Paul are thinking about these issues, because they affect us all in more ways than most of us ever consider.
