Mitigating Government Access to Data

The mitigations used to mitigate lawful government access to data might or might not also be effective in mitigating unlawful government access to data and signals intelligence threat scenarios; it’s difficult to determine with so little insight and publicly available data on these activities. However, from a cybersecurity strategy perspective, all three of these scenarios essentially represent the same type of threat – the threat of unauthorized access to data. For security professionals, this is a simple but powerful construct. Many of the same controls they are already familiar with will help mitigate unauthorized access to data regardless of who is trying to access it.

The CIO of the German company we have been advising in this chapter now understands how low the probability of US government access to data is. The CIO is surprised that the probability estimates are so low, given all the negative press and concern this topic garners...