I know what you’re thinking. “Not another post about how we need comprehensive privacy legislation,” [insert eye roll emoji] I get it. We all know that we need privacy legislation at the federal level and we all know we are unlikely to get it soon.

More times than not, asking the right question is more important than getting an answer. Such is the case with connected communities deployments where municipal technologies purport to have the ability to solve all the right problems. Said another way, the technology vendors are telling municipalities which questions to ask and then answering them. But are those the right questions?

Boy, who needs a drink, eh? Critical infrastructure, cyber vulnerabilities, AI, lack of guidance, forget it. Before you reach for something strong to drown your sorrows, let’s kick back for a second with something calming. Coming your way right here, right now, and courtesy of GoTech is a toolkit that our municipal officials and critical infrastructure operators can use to help begin to mitigate risks from connected community architecture deployments.

Much like how a combination of ostensibly unrelated ingredients can result in a delicious salad, U.S. critical infrastructure coalesces disparate parts to form the public services and functions that we have come to rely on.

Having a general conversation about risk is about as useful as having one about AI, IoT, or any other technology. These are terms that can mean nothing and everything at the same time. A statement like, “We need to do something about IoT” is vague to the point of not being useful. “What are the risks to our organization,” sounds similarly insightful and commanding but means little.

Any conversation about the concept of convergence should start in the logical place: chocolate and peanut butter. Convergence is when two (or more) things layered together create a capability that is greater than the individual components.

Security and privacy are two sides of the same coin – it’s hard to have one without the other. Yet there can be a tension between them. Strong legal and technological protections, including encryption, are necessary to effectively protect private data and communications. Yet terrorists, smugglers of dangerous weapons and drugs, human traffickers, and perpetrators of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) sometimes use end-to-end encrypted messaging (E2EE) to prevent their crimes from being discovered by law enforcement. Proposed U.S. laws such as the EARN IT Act seek to end E2EE messaging so that law enforcement need not fear criminals "going dark."