Top 100 Government Domain

From a national security viewpoint, a higher degree of cyber autonomy is crucial to reduce the reliance on external, often times uncertain and untrustworthy entities, achieving better resilience against adversaries. To probe into the concept of cyber autonomy of governments, this study examines the external dependency of the public-facing government websites across the world’s major industrialized, Group of Seven (G7) countries. With a further investigation on the web re-sources loaded by G7 government sites, we find that approximately85% of them originate from the United States. By reviewing policy documents and surveying technicians who maintain government websites, we identify three significant forces that can influence the degree of a government’s autonomy, including government mandates on HTTPS adoption, website development outsourcing, and the citizen’s fear of large-scale surveillance. Because a government website is considered as a nation’s critical information infrastructure, we expect this study to raise awareness of their complex dependency, thereby reducing the risk of blindly trusting external entities when using critical government services.new messages2:41 PM