With the aggressive pace of technological change and the onslaught of news regarding data breaches, cyber-attacks, and technological threats to privacy and security, it is easy to assume these are fundamentally new threats. The pace of technological change is slower than it feels, and many seemingly new categories of threats have been with us longer than we remember. Nervous System is a monthly series that approaches issues of data privacy and cyber security from the context of history—to look to the past for clues about how to interpret the present and prepare for the future.

 

Email technology has not changed materially since it was devised in the early 1960s—and many of the quirks of email can be attributed to our determination in keeping one of the world's primary channels of communications backward compatible with email systems devised generations ago.