The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has announced the establishment of three new academic centers focused on laying the foundations for smart, sustainable public policy to deal with cyber threats faced by governments, businesses, and individuals.

Through its Cyber Initiative, the foundation will award grants of $15 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley to jump-start a new field of cyber policy analysis, with the aim of creating a robust conversation around how best to enhance the trustworthiness of computer systems while balancing organizations' and individuals' privacy rights, the need for data security, digital innovation, and the broader public interest. The initiatives at all three universities will embrace campus-wide efforts to connect and encourage scholars across disciplines — including engineering, political science, economics, public policy, business, anthropology, and information technology — to work collaboratively on cyber issues and related policy problems.

With the world increasingly dependent on the Internet for everything from banking to medical record keeping, the risk of disruption — from the merely inconvenient to the truly catastrophic — is clear, as is the need to develop workable systems capable of containing these threats. But government and industry have largely focused their siloed cybersecurity efforts on the immediate need to thwart potential enemies, hackers, and thieves.

To broaden that focus, each school will take a slightly different tack in setting up its new center. MIT's Cybersecurity Policy Initiative will focus on establishing quantitative metrics and qualitative models to help inform policy makers about the scope of the problem. Stanford's Cyber Initiative will draw on the school's extensive experience with multidisciplinary, university-wide initiatives to focus on the core themes of trustworthiness and governance of networks. And UC Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity will be organized around assessing the possible future paths "cybersecurity" might take.

"Choices we are making today about Internet governance and security have profound implications for the future," said Hewlett Foundation president Larry Kramer. "To make those choices well, it is imperative that they be made with some sense of what lies ahead and, still more important, of where we want to go. We view these grants as providing seed capital to begin generating thoughtful options."