The Assembly Forum serves as a unique discussion forum for senior leadership from industry, the US national security community, the academic field, and civil society. The Forum hosts candid high-level briefings and conversations, covering the unique challenges that government and industry must address as they approach disinformation and cybersecurity.

The Forum builds on the work and track record of its predecessor, the Berklett Cybersecurity project, which was founded in 2015 to regularly convene an unprecedentedly diverse group of experts to thoughtfully discuss cybersecurity topics core to government, foreign intelligence, law enforcement, civil society, and industry.  In 2016, the project published its first report – “Don’t Panic: Making Progress on the ‘Going Dark’ Debate” – which took on claims and questions around the government finding a landscape that is “going dark” due to new forms of encryption introduced into mainstream products by the companies who offer them.

 

The New York Times’ national security correspondent, David Sanger, described Don’t Panic as “among the sharpest counterpoints yet” in the encryption debate.  In a speech at MIT in March 2016, Robert Hannigan, then Director of the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), recounted the report as one of “the key contributions of the last few years in my area.”