President Biden's new cybersecurity policy allows U.S. agencies to preemptively hack into the computer networks of criminals and foreign governments.

President Biden is about to approve a policy that goes much farther than any previous effort to protect private companies from malicious hackers—and to retaliate against those hackers with our own cyberattacks. The 35-page document, titled “National Cybersecurity Strategy,” differs from the dozen or so similar papers signed by presidents over the past quarter-century in two significant ways: First, it imposes mandatory regulations on a wide swath of American industries. In an article he later wrote for Foreign Affairs, he described the mission, with its greater latitude, as “hunt forward” and “persistent engagement.” Corporate lobbyists successfully resisted mandatory cybersecurity regulations on private companies for years. The other sections of the Biden paper—which includes 30 pages dealing with purely defensive measures—outline still more drastic departures from present policies to protect the nation’s “critical infrastructure.” That term, “critical infrastructure,” was coined in the mid-1990s and refers to economic sectors—such as banking, finance, electrical power, water works, transportation systems, telecommunications, and emergency management services—that are essential to modern societies and are connected to computer networks, meaning they are vulnerable to cyberattacks. Still, there are, inevitably, some lingering ambiguities, which are to be settled in a subsequent “implementation strategy.” It was way back in October 1997 when President Clinton’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection warned of “cyber attacks” that could “paralyze or panic large segments of society” and “limit the freedom of action of our national leadership”—adding, “We must learn to negotiate a new geography, where borders are irrelevant and distances meaningless, where an enemy may be able to harm the vital systems we depend on without confronting our military power.” A quarter-century later, Biden’s new strategy goes a long distance toward coming to grips with this new geography.