BULWARK is the KCPD's cybersecurity division - a highly-trained organization of netrunners, hackers, and cybersecurity specialists employed by the KCPD to patrol the Kunari City Cyberspace. They're the people responsible for checking your transaction history, tracking your PIK, and making sure you don't access anything too crazy on the Net - to some extent at least. To say that we've each got a personal agent tracking our activity is a bit of an overstatement, but BULWARK agents work 24/7 to keep the net as clear as they reasonably can. A majority of the KCPD's funding goes towards their cybersecurity initiatives, meaning BULWARK gets most of that.
BULWARK oversees both the Kunari City Local Net as well as its connecting datalines to other nets. BULWARK agents comb over, with the help of artificial intelligence, every file and piece of data that attempts transfer across nets. Anything flagged as suspicious by BULWARK A.I. is then examined by agents, who then determine whether it should be allowed transfer. In exchange, the transfer of data across nets tends to be much slower, taking days or even weeks. You'd better hope you don't have anything urgent to send across international lines.
History
BULWARK was founded in 2043, a decade after Kunari City split from Juwon and became the independent bastion of society that it is today. Kunari's split from Juwon meant that the Kunari City Net became independent of Juwon's cybersecurity corporations and, for a period of time, lacked regulation overall. Pretty quickly, KCMA officials realized the dangers (benefits to some) of having an unrestricted net and began employing foreign cybersecurity corporations to monitor it. In the meantime, they began training and hiring netrunners and hackers through their law enforcement academies, offering scholarships and courses to coax IT specialists and cybersecurity students at local universities. Eventually in 2043, the KCPD launched their own cybersecurity branch: BULWARK.
KCMA officials soon realized how daunting of a task monitoring the net would be, quickly implementing plans to expand the number of BULWARK agents and increase the program's funding. Additionally, in 2052, the rights to a set of simplistic artificial intelligence programs were bought by the KCPD to be used to automatically filter and monitor more mundane information on the net. This cleared the payroll a lot of entry-level cybersecurity jobs, leaving BULWARK in a better position to focus on actually netrunning. While A.I. made those jobs obsolete with its efficiency, new agents still need training in entry-level positions - leaving BULWARK to partner with domestic tech firms. That way, BULWARK maintained complete efficiency and the new guys still got their training wheels.
Largely, the KCPD and BULWARK work in tandem, with the KCPD relying on BULWARK agents to gather information for arrests. In return, the KCPD provides BULWARK with evidence and reports to cross-examine with suspicious net activity. BULWARK played an essential role for the KCPD in the New Depression and the rioting of the late 2080s as agents infiltrated criminal and cyberterrorist cells, gathering key information that would prevent government and financial data leaks. BULWARK remains a controversial yet necessary component of the KCPD in the modern day, continuing their vigilant oversight of the net and protecting the people of Kunari from cyberterrorism.
Comments