War on the Internet: Threat to National Security as Pretext for Controls

As earlier posted, governments around the world will be rationalizing control of the web or the cyberspace by putting up various bogeymen (strawmen).

The US has now been considering cyber attacks as a threat to national security that would justify military response.

From the Wall Street Journal,

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military.

This is an overblown reaction.

Writes Cato’s Benjamin Friedman

Actually, our claim is not that we should never use military means to respond to cyberattacks. Our point instead is that the vast majority of events given that name have nothing to do with national security. Most “cyberattackers” are criminals: thieves looking to steal credit card numbers or corporate data, extortionists threatening denial of service attacks, or vandals altering websites to grind personal or political axes. These acts require police, not aircraft carriers.

Even the cyberattacks that have affected our national security do not justify war, we argue. There is little evidence that online spying has ever done grievous harm to national security, thinly sourced reports to the contrary notwithstanding. In any case, we do not threaten war in response to traditional espionage and should not do so merely because it occurs online.

Moreover, despite panicked reports claiming that hackers are poised to sabotage our “critical infrastructure” — downing planes, flooding dams, crippling Wall Street — hackers have accomplished nothing of the sort. We prevent these nightmares by decoupling the infrastructure management system from the public internet. But even these higher-end cyberattacks are only likely to damage commerce, not kill, so threatening to bomb in response to them seems belligerent.

I am reminded by this wonderful quote from General Douglas MacArthur who said that government has always peddled fear to expand over us.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour -with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it

Always somewhere a deception designed to curtail our liberties.

War on the Internet: G-8 Mulls Regulation of the Web

As earlier predicted, global politicians who see their turfs dramatically being eroded by the rapidly expanding flow of decentralized information, enabled and facilitated by the web, will declare an open war against the cyberspace.

The New York Times reports,

Leaders of the Group of 8 industrialized countries are set to issue a provocative call for stronger Internet regulation, a cause championed by the host of the meeting, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, but fiercely opposed by some Internet companies and free-speech groups.

The G-8 leaders will urge the adoption of measures to protect children from online predators, to strengthen privacy rights and to crack down on digital copyright piracy, according to two people who have seen drafts of a communiqué the G-8 will issue at the end of a meeting this week in Deauville, France. At the same time, the document is expected to include a pledge to maintain openness and to support entrepreneurial, rather than government-led, development of the Internet.

This balancing act was reflected Tuesday in a speech by Mr. Sarkozy, who convened a special gathering of the global digerati in Paris on the eve of the G-8 meeting. Calling the rise of the Internet a “revolution,” Mr. Sarkozy compared its impact to that of two previous transforming episodes in global history: the age of exploration and the industrial revolution.

The Internet revolution “doesn’t have a flag, it doesn’t have a slogan, it belongs to everyone,” he said, citing the recent uprisings in the Arab world as examples of its positive effects.

These actions represent “resistance to change”, whereby politicians will try to enforce information control or censorship in the way the industrial age used to operate.

The horizontal flow of information threatens the institutional centralized frameworks built upon the industrial age economy.

As I earlier wrote,

Political and economic ideology latched on a vertical top-bottom flow of power will be on a collision course with horizontal real time flow of democratized knowledge.

This would likely result to less applicability of ideologies based on centralization, which could substantially erode its support base and shift political capital to decentralized structure of political governance that would conform with the horizontal structure of information flows.

People will know more therefore control from the top will be less an appealing idea.

But again these attempts to regulate the web are likely to fail.

Nevertheless the war on the internet accounts as part of the adjustment process away from the command and control structure of the industrial ages with the knowledge revolution taking place beyond the reach of politicians. Besides, technological advances will work around regulations.

As visionary Alvin Toffler writes (Revolutionary Wealth p.40)

As change accelerates still further, institutional crisis will not be limited to the United States. Every country in the twenty-first-century world economy—including China, India, Japan and the E.U. nations—will need to invest new style institutions and adjust the balance between synchronization and de-synchronization. Some countries may find it more difficult than the United States, whose culture, at least, smiles on change-makers.

Cyberspace: A Battleground Between Socialism and Free Markets

Governments are going to have a hard time trying to control the cyber space.

According to the Economist,

GOVERNMENTS are increasingly finding ways to enforce their laws in the digital realm. The most prominent is China’s “great firewall”. But China is by no means the only country erecting borders in cyberspace. The OpenNet Initiative, an advocacy group, lists more than a dozen countries that block internet content for political, social and security reasons. They do not need especially clever technology: governments go increasingly after dominant online firms because they are easy to get hold of. In April Google published the numbers of requests it had received from official agencies to remove content or provide information about users.

Based on his recent article, security expert Bruce Schneier would say that web regulation is a folly.

That’s because of three things:

1. It would mean a massive war against deepening spontaneous order, division of labor and diversity.

Internet is the largest communications system mankind has ever created, and it works because it is distributed. There is no central authority. No nation is in charge. Plugging all the holes isn't possible.

2. To engage in cyberspace control means censorship. It’s also a war waged against the spread of knowledge with stark ramifications.

The second flawed assumption is that we can predict the effects of such a shutdown. The Internet is the most complex machine mankind has ever built

3. The complexities of the cyberspace extrapolates to manifold loopholes and action-reaction dynamics.

The third flawed assumption is that we could build this capability securely. We can't. Once we engineered a selective shutdown switch into the Internet, and implemented a way to do what Internet engineers have spent decades making sure never happens, we would have created an enormous security vulnerability. We would make the job of any would-be terrorist intent on bringing down the Internet much easier.

Mr. Schneier concludes,

Computer and network security is hard, and every Internet system we've ever created has security vulnerabilities. It would be folly to think this one wouldn't as well. And given how unlikely the risk is, any actual shutdown would be far more likely to be a result of an unfortunate error or a malicious hacker than of a presidential order. But the main problem with an Internet kill switch is that it's too coarse a hammer. Yes, the bad guys use the Internet to communicate, and they can use it to attack us. But the good guys use it, too, and the good guys far outnumber the bad guys. Shutting the Internet down, either the whole thing or just a part of it, even in the face of a foreign military attack would do far more damage than it could possibly prevent. And it would hurt others whom we don't want to hurt.

At the end of the day, one of the two forces (free markets versus socialism) would have to yield. Guess who?