Citizens in the Digital Age: ICTs safety & security

The idea is to extend the studies and try to create a common umbrella not only for cybersecurity but for any kind of technology solution that will range between security, safety and even disaster prevention or recovery and management. If we consider safety, we have natural and human disasters but also infrastructure, transportation, safety at working places and our every day life, health, … If we speak about security—apart from cybersecurity, we have human security, security of goods, assets and items (including food, drugs, etc.), but also the security of ideas. Some actions in this field: On the occasion of the 10th World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in May 2015 in Geneva, a group has been created in order to support the idea to enlarge the scope of action line C5. Building confidence and security in the use of ICTs. This group will have the possibility to discuss at the Preparatory Meeting of the WSIS in October at the United Nations Secretariat, New York. The hope is that this will lead to a new programme for the follow-up of the WSIS. To conclude with an example, Grillo is a compact device, a cube, created by a group of young Mexicans, in order to provide citizens with an early warning system in case of an earthquake. The moderator then followed-up with the question concerning the mentioned four aspects of cybersecurity (safety, security, disaster prevention, recovery and management) taking us away from a more technical aspect to a more human one in terms of the era we live in and how we deal with disasters in these areas. Why those four areas? In order to be more explanatory, Mr Ronchi referred to an example of the technical university he is teaching at: There are a lot of skills related to security and safety in different departments. However, in each department, people used to work as stand-alone researcher and no one tried to mix up the knowledge, the different skills in order to improve the potential of the group. It took 10 years to put all of them together and to create a cluster of people consisting of chemical engineers, structural engineers, mechanical engineers, people from the information science etc. and to create a small unit of about 50 people that share the same concept of security. During the very first meeting almost every participant declared learning something from a colleague coming from another sector and the usefulness of transferring this to the own sector. Starting from this small nucleus a kind of international group, a joint research group, has been created aggregating additional forces in order to improve this holistic vision about risk assessment in general. This is very closed to what was mentioned in the presentation: the idea to put together things that are usually separated.