Delegates to the Democratic National Committee on Monday approved a party platform that barely mentions cybersecurity, reversing a trend from the 2020 version and mirroring the Republican Party’s document.
The Democrats’ 2024 manifesto made only two explicit mentions of cyberspace, both vague, and in one case it failed to mention that Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden, was the party’s candidate – a phenomenon that affects the entire manifesto.
“We will remove barriers to access to justice, combat hate crimes and counter cyber threats,” the platform promises in one section.
“He (Biden) will continue to address cyber threats by strengthening the capacity of our intelligence agencies and leading the development of rules of the road for technologies such as artificial intelligence,” the platform promises elsewhere.
The platform is paying more attention to privacy, an issue that sometimes overlaps with cybersecurity. In a privacy section, it praises the Biden administration’s actions to protect consumer data from commercial data brokers, “foreign intelligence actors” and identity thieves.
“We need to do more and update and adopt the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, protect the privacy of student data by ensuring that data collected in schools is used only for educational purposes, and update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to protect personal electronic information and location information,” it says.
It also says that Democrats want to pass bipartisan legislation to protect children online and create laws for the tech industry that allow users to control and transfer their data. In addition, the party wants to improve protections against cyberstalking, deepfakes and voice impersonations.
The Republican platform for 2024 contains two sentences on cybersecurity, but no mention of privacy. “Republicans will use every tool of national power to protect our nation’s critical infrastructure and industrial base from malicious cyber actors,” it says. “This will be a national priority, and we will both raise security standards for our critical systems and networks and defend them against malicious actors.”
By comparison, the Democrats’ 2020 platform explicitly mentions cybersecurity in five different places. The Republicans resorted to “copy and paste” in 2020 and reused their 2016 platform instead of writing a new one. The 2016 platform did not mention cybersecurity once.
Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, said he was “disappointed” by the sparse mentions of cybersecurity in the Democrats’ 92-page 2024 document, but added: “I’m not overreacting to that.”
That’s because “platforms aren’t that important,” he said. When it comes to cybersecurity, he would have liked to see a discussion about the importance of protecting critical infrastructure. But he believes the Biden administration’s record on this issue is more significant.
“Over the last four years, they have put a lot of energy into critical infrastructure and cybersecurity,” he said. “I would say their intent has been high and their execution has been moderate. I have to give them credit because they have shown the intent to work on the issue.”
He said he was glad that critical infrastructure was mentioned in the Republicans’ 2024 platform “because despite some successes in this area, their intentions were probably less targeted.”
Moreover, cybersecurity does not receive as much attention in party platforms as some other, more politically oriented issues because “nobody is politically against cybersecurity,” says Bruce McConnell, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center.
“Cyber is not a political issue, so it is often neglected on platforms and the like. No one pays much attention to the issue until they have to,” McConnell, a former Department of Homeland Security cyber official, said by email. “Even then, you have to look at how short-lived the coverage of the Crowdstrike (Microsoft) bug was. Partly it’s because the damage is usually invisible – the Crowdstrike (Microsoft) scenes at airports were impressive and unusual.”
Whoever wins will likely focus on cyber, regardless of what the platforms mention or don’t mention, said Norma Krayem, vice president and head of cybersecurity, privacy and digital innovation at Van Scoyoc Associates, a government affairs firm. Harris has been active in the critical infrastructure and cybersecurity space as vice president for the past four years, Krayem said.
“The party platforms also represent a compromise within the party as a whole,” she said. “Privacy is very important because the nation is facing increasing cyber risks. The fact that cyber is not explicitly listed is not an indication of a change in the top priorities for the Harris-Walz ticket.”
And the passage on cybersecurity in the Republican election manifesto is notable at least because it signals “a series of active and possibly mandatory cybersecurity requirements” in the event of a Trump victory, Krayem said.
Derek B. Johnson contributed to this story.
