Last month, the First American Financial Corporation—which provides title insurance for millions of Americans—acknowledged a cybersecurity vulnerability that potentially exposed 885 million private financial records related to mortgage deals to unauthorized viewers. These records might have revealed bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and driver’s license images to such viewers. If history is any guide, not much will happen and companies holding sensitive personal information on individuals will have little incentive to improve their cybersecurity postures. Congress needs to act to provide such incentives.

In nearly two and a half centuries of American constitutionalism, from 1776 to today, the words that are most difficult to understand yet crucial to our republic are found in Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address. Reflecting upon the Supreme Court’s infamous pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Lincoln observed that “the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

"Third World” is now an anachronistic geographical term of the old Cold War. But after 1989, “Third World” was reinvented from a political noun into an adjective to mean more than just Asian, African, and Latin American nations nonaligned with either the West or the Soviet bloc.

Hoover Institution fellow Larry Diamond discusses his latest book Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency.