Hello,
There’s a certain thrill in watching Zero Trust Architecture march to center stage in the cybersecurity world. Like a freshly knighted squire, it brandishes its motto— “never trust, always verify” like a shield, and does so with admirable conviction. After all, who could possibly argue against more robust cybersecurity in a time of endemic cyber-insecurity? (16 billion passwords, anyone?) There are few who’ve not felt the sting of breaches originating from misplaced trust and afterwards wondered about the lack of accountability. Or, for that matter, meaningful change or remediation. So why, then, does something that seems so necessary sometimes feel so unsettling?
It may be because we’ve mistaken vigilance for virtue. Many modern Zero Trust implementations have embraced an extreme interpretation of control, one evocative less of a careful, vigilant guardian and more a pervasive panopticon that might make Big Brother swoon with envy. Step back for a moment. In these environments, users are authenticated, their behaviors are profiled, and every bit and byte of activity is captured in the name of context and clarity. It’s thorough. It’s rigorous. It’s also deeply, uncomfortably surveillant.
This isn’t to say the core intent of Zero Trust is flawed. NIST SP 800-207 lays out a compelling vision of security that doesn’t rely on perimeter assumptions or legacy trust models. But when implementation drifts away from balanced engineering and toward omnipresent oversight that forces the people and organizations paying for a security solution to trust unknown and unknowable people and systems, the foundation starts to fracture. This isn’t due to a lack of technical capability, proficiency, or inherent insecurity but because of the deprecation of privacy inherent to the concept of trust mandate.
The problem lies in conflation. Security is not synonymous with privacy. The two walk next to each other, to be sure, but with different technical and ethical compasses…and very different destinations. A privacy-respecting system isn’t simply secure—it’s predictable, accountable, and designed with human dignity in mind. But far too often, we encounter architectures that treat privacy as a “nice to have,” a checkbox to be consulted after the security stack is fully built and humming along.
That’s a risk in and of itself. Why? Because security without privacy tends to harden into control. And unchecked, anonymous control corrodes trust. What started as a protective fortress becomes an imprisoning panopticon. History (Stasi anyone?), even recent digital history, reminds us that technologies built for protection often find their second life in surveillance, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly.
The answer isn’t to abandon Zero Trust, just as we didn’t abandon authentication, encryption, or threat modeling. The answer is to design with balance from the outset. To bake in privacy principles like anonymity, disassociability, transparency, and purpose limitation; not because regulators might frown, but because our users deserve systems that don’t ask them to trade trust for protection.
Let’s ask tougher questions of our architectures. Not just whether they stop threats, but whether they respect the humans who use them. Not just whether telemetry is rich enough, but whether its use is constrained, declared, and revocable. Let’s align purpose with principle.
The goal isn’t to build systems that see everything, it’s to build systems that see enough. Enough to defend, to respond, and to heal. But never so much that the defense becomes the threat.
Build it right, America.
Adam Firestone
Editor-in-Chief
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