Tools and Weapons: The Promise and The Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

Finally, you enter a cavernous room, a temple to the information age and cornerstone of our digital lives. A hushed hum welcomes you into the nerve center containing floor-to-ceiling racks filled with computers, lined up in a formation that extends beyond your line of sight. This massive library of steel and circuits contains servers each identical in footprint but containing its own unique volume of data. It is the digital world’s filing cabinet. Somewhere in one of these rooms in one of these buildings, there are data files that belong to you. They have the email you wrote this morning, the document you worked on last night, and the photo you took yesterday afternoon. They also likely contain personal information from your bank, doctor, and employer. The files occupy just a tiny sliver of a hard drive on one of these thousands and thousands of computers. Each file is encrypted, meaning that the information is encoded so that only authorized users of that data can read it.