The Library of Congress Was Hacked Because It Hasn’t Joined the Digital Age

With the presidential election taking all the air out of the room, July's IT attack on the Library of Congress barely made the news. But for good governance advocates and policymakers, this denial of service attack, which caused a three day service outage, validated decades of complaints about the Library of Congress’ failure to join the digital age.

Americans are familiar with the Library’s mission to archive the world’s literature and research. But Congress, librarians, and specialized policy wonks are more familiar with the Library’s many other functions, including the intelligence gatherer, legislative tracker, governance think tank, and intellectual property bureaucracy. The library’s dysfunction is bad news for Congressional staff, and the researchers and scholars who defend on the archives of American history and information on the world’s most unstable regions.