Cybersecurity? What cybersecurity? Citizens who may have harbored the idea that there was a murderously efficient J. Edgar Hoover of the Internet, working day and night, will be much disappointed at the contents of two recent government reports. They are easy to summarize: not only is very little of use being done, but essentially nobody is doing it. There is barely a boss and hardly any techno-G-men defending us from hackers, terrorists, scam artists, foreign nations, and others who might wish to do our Internet harm.

The major problems in Internet security [many of which are detailed in "The Internet Is Broken"], are nowhere close to being addressed at the federal level, and what little is being done is on the wrong track, favoring summits, partnerships, and "information sharing" over the much more necessary but less visible work of long-term research and development.