Rebecca Slayton is a historian and associate professor at Cornell University, where her research examines how expertise, quantification, and technology shape security policy. Her work has helped define how scholars think about the history of computer security — including a widely cited study of why the U.S. government spent nearly two decades trying, and repeatedly failing, to agree on how computer security risk should be measured.
In this episode, Professor Slayton walks us through that history. Her work makes the case that the real value of this effort was never the final number, but instead the learning that happened inside organizations while people tried to understand computer security, a value that automation often ended up destroying. We talk about that argument, and what it still says about measuring anything with uncertainty.
