Secretary Blinken launched the United States International Cyberspace and Digital Policy Strategy during his keynote address at the 2024 RSA conference in San Francisco.
This strategy updates the previous International Strategy for Cyberspace, released in 2011, and focuses on the concept of digital solidarity, which is a willingness to work together on shared goals, to stand together, to help partners build capacity, and to provide mutual support. Digital solidarity recognizes that all who use digital technologies in a rights-respecting manner are more secure, resilient, self-determining, and prosperous when we work together to shape the international environment and innovate at the technological edge. The concept rests on efforts to build digital and cyber capacity so that partners are not only better able to build a defensible and resilient digital ecosystem over the long term but are also able to respond and recover quickly when incidents happen and to hold criminal and malign actors accountable.
This new strategy sets out a path for the United States to mobilize all resources at its disposal to implement an affirmative and proactive vision for our digital world while building digital solidarity with partners, allies, and stakeholders.
To build broad digital solidarity, the strategy lays out:
Three guiding principles:
- An affirmative vision for a secure and inclusive cyberspace grounded in international law, including international human rights law; and
- Integration of cybersecurity, sustainable development, and technological innovation; and
- A comprehensive policy approach that utilizes the appropriate tools of diplomacy and international statecraft across the entire digital ecosystem.
Four areas of action:
- Promote, build, and maintain an open, inclusive, secure, and resilient digital ecosystem;
- Align rights-respecting approaches to digital and data governance with international partners;
- Advance responsible state behavior in cyberspace, and counter threats to cyberspace and critical infrastructure by building coalitions and engaging partners; and
- Strengthen and build international partner digital and cyber capacity, including capacity to combat cybercrime.
Read the strategy here.
