Since the hacking of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, etc., and the Mandiant revelations about China’s PLA Unit 61398, the media and Internet have exploded with talk of our reaching a “tipping point” in cybersecurity (or not, depending on the point of view). We’re, in fact, long past the “tipping point”: what Mandiant had to say about Chinese hacking was actually old news to those who follow things cyber.

As has been the case in the past, there seem to be three camps on the issue of cybersecurity: “the-sky-is-falling” or “cyber-Pearl-Harbor” camp, the “overblown-threat” camp, and the camp worried about the cyberdefense threat to privacy rights. Well, maybe there’s four. We can’t forget the ridiculous advocacy of international “rules of the game” for cyberspace, which was recently argued by Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Financial Times. All four are running in circles, and there seems to be nothing much new from any of them. President Obama issued his cybersecurity executive order on February 12, but there’s little novelty in it. It has elicited few comments beyond “not enough, too preliminary” and “a worrisome expansion of government right-to-prying-on-citizens.”