TOW #5 "Obama Calls for New Cooperation to Wrangle the ‘Wild West’ Internet"

              This article discusses President Obama’s recent comment that he internet has become “the wild wild west.” He made these comments during a gathering in Palo Alto, California. He spoke alongside figures like Tim cook, the CEO of Apple. Together, they proposed ideas as to how major corporations and intelligence agencies might share information in a more protected way. The report on the events were given by Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger. Combined, these two have written over 5,000 articles for The New York Times.

              It is quite clear that this article was written for the modern audience. The issue of cyber-security is a profound and rapidly-changing one. The ways in which we, as a society, handle the developing threats are critical to keeping the information of the world safe. The New York Times, like all media, benefits from attention and thus would be hasty to write an article that appeals to people’s fears. The article states that Obama chose to have the event around Stanford University because it is largely acclaimed to be the birthplace of the internet.

              The most prevalent rhetoric is Obama’s metaphor of the internet being like the wild west. This metaphor is extended by the idea of major corporations being asked to take the role of Sheriff. The article’s commentary on the events display sarcasm towards the end of the report. While quoting many of the figures who spoke at the event on how important trust between the corporations and intelligence agencies is to maintaining a safe cyberspace, the article mentions how “intelligence agencies were surreptitiously siphoning off customer data from companies like Google and Yahoo as it flowed internally between their data centers.” Tis is made particularly effective by its juxtaposition to a quote from the Vice-President of security at Google, who said, “The tricky thing with information-sharing is that it is about trust, information-sharing becomes pretty hard to do once trust is lost.” The purpose of this sarcasm was to show that there is still a large amount of work to do in order to achieve the goal of safety, and the authors prove it with the goals themselves.