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 cybersecurity from the context of history—to look to the past for clues about how to interpret the present and prepare for the future.

 

In June 1984, the New York Times reported that the credit histories of over 90 million Americans had been exposed. The scale of the compromise was staggering. It remains one of the largest identity-theft data breaches that the financial services industry has publicly acknowledged. The New York Times reporter, however, struggled to explain the event to the paper's readers. The story turned on the theft of a computer password that was then posted to an electronic bulletin board. These were not familiar concepts in 1984.