Transatlantic Cyber Policy Research Initiative workshop

On December 12th-13th the EU Cyber Direct project, hosted by project partner GMF, organized a two-day conference in Washington DC bringing together American and European experts and policy-makers to discuss increased cooperation. The first part of the conference focused on the implementation of a Transatlantic Cyber Policy Research Initiative. The second part focused on transatlantic responses to norm violations.

In this workshop, cybersecurity and research experts from the United States and Europe drafted and debated a possible model for the implementation for the Transatlantic Cyber Policy Research Initiative (TCPRI) which was agreed on in the EU-US Cyber Dialogue 2016.

The workshop identified concrete topics for the US and EU to conduct joint research within the framework to deliver tangible results for policy challenges that need to be solved within the next five years. Specific topics that could inform diplomatic efforts were among others:

measurement of the effectiveness of cybersecurity information sharing;

analysing shared market requirements;

evaluation of new threats from emerging technologies;

evaluation of requirements for interoperable standards for cybersecurity and dataprotection;

defining a strategic resilience framework.

The experts tested to what extent those challenges can be solved in a research environment and subsequently feed into the EU-US diplomatic efforts — using methods borrowed from science diplomacy. A key outcome was that the initially in the Cyber Dialogue imagined core group of academic, civil society and think tanks would need to be extended to a broader range of stakeholders including private sector and government representatives. Another crucial aspect is the setup of the working mechanism for the TCPRI. Here, a core group coordinating the efforts, possibly run by a think tank, was favored.