One of the ironies of Pax Americana is that it rests upon the nuclear bombing of Japan at the end of the Second World War. Yet this searing and incontrovertible statement of technological superiority, power and the will to use it has not been the final word on global security for some time. Nuclear weapons still shape and reshape foreign policy, but we have another technological dragon sleeping right beneath us. As a weapon, this monster might prove infinitely more unconventional, while at the same time being so mundane and so widespread that it makes a nuclear threat seem to be the least of our worries.
The World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, which just finished, is a reminder that the economic crisis is not just about failing banks, over-speculation, housing bubbles, unemployment and recessions. The world economy seems to be transforming into something, although we do not know what. As the BBC's economics editor Stephanie Flanders commented:
There used to be something symbolic in Davos, all those movers and shakers going to the mountains to talk about capitalism being on top. This year the more apt feature is the fog. No one knows where the world is going, but they are fairly sure that it is in the opposite direction to the one before. When the fog finally lifts, [there is] some here fear there won't be much of a global market economy left.
The best economists are really psychologists, and they see that the postmodern mind is yearning for a new standard of certainty in the economic crisis. They see that we have stretched money, which has always been merely an abstract idea, to its virtual limits. Money is becoming less credible. But they do not yet see that the crisis is not just a result of rampant speculation. It is also the result of the fact that we are actively replacing money with another hard currency: information.
What happens to our society, to government, when the anchor of credibility upon which our confidence in the social, economic, political, civil‚ and even moral‚ order rests‚ has transmogrified from cash into information? The World Economic Forum, while mulling over the latest world causes, heard from experts on the imminent threats of cybercrime and cyber-warfare. It is not a topic that garners the support of celebrity spokespeople. Perhaps because the issue lacks a human face, it is noticed less by the public at large. Still, several countries, as well as terrorist and paramilitary organizations are developing the capacity to use the Internet as a weapon. And some, allegedly China above all, are already wielding that ability: for espionage; for propaganda and disinformation; for attacking conventional military computer-driven systems; and for attacking vital utilities, civil infrastructure, transportation and communications networks, research institutions, and commercial interests. One Web site cites reports that China is developing "a fourth branch of its People's Liberation Army devoted solely cyberwarfare." This follows upon a 1999 strategic agenda entitled, Unrestricted Warfare, apparently by two Chinese military officers. A statement in 2000 from the U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Vision 2020, declared that "operations within the information domain will become as important as those conducted in the domains of sea, land, air, and space."
It is widely claimed that China and Russia recently attacked U.S. government and industry computers, in campaigns respectively called Titan Rain and Moonlight Maze. In 2002, the CIA reported that both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda were planning to attack western computer networks. In 2007, Estonia and Kyrgyzstan sustained serious cyber-attacks. In January of this year, both the FBI and MI5 warned that the Internet is evolving rapidly into a weapon of war, second only to weapons of mass destruction. They say we are waiting for "Cybergeddon." On February 2 of this year, Andrew Nusca reported that Russia had just launched a cyber-attack against Kyrgyzstan.
What is especially chilling is the fact that so-called private computers are now two-way windows into our homes and offices, and they share in this larger public danger. A report just circulated that the Downadup cyberworm, also known as Conficker or Kido, is currently infecting millions of machines in UK, including those of the UK Ministry of Defense.
No one knows what a dormant worm, once installed on millions of computers, will do, particularly if it allows infected computers to be controlled from a distance. Of Downadup, Finnish security company official Mikko Hypponen stated, "It would make for one big badass botnet."
Cyber-warfare will change our whole understanding of war. How that will happen depends on changes already taking place. Our Achilles heel here is mass dependence combined with mass ignorance. It is a tired truism to say that Internet and related computer technology flooded our society, perhaps more quickly and with greater species-wide impact than any other major innovative jump in human history. But it is worth recalling this point, as social critic Chuck Klosterman has, in order to understand how little we comprehend the enormity of the change:
In less than a decade, millions of Americans went from (1) not knowing what the Internet was, to (2) knowing what it was but not using it, to (3) having an e-mail address, to (4) using e-mail pretty much every day, to (5) being unable to exist professionally or socially without it. For 98 percent of the world, the speed and sweep of that evolution was too great to fathom. Consequently, we learned how to use tools most of us don't understand. This has always been the case with technology, but not quite to this extent. I mean, I drive a car that I can't fix and that I could certainly never build, but I still understand how it works in a way that goes (slightly) beyond the theoretical. Conversely, I don't understand anything about the construction of the Internet. And I'm not interested in how it works; I just want to feel like I vaguely grasp its potential and vaguely understand how to use that potential to my advantage.
Klosterman says what a lot of people feel about this issue, if they think about it at all. While we become increasingly mesmerized by and enmeshed in social networking sites and similar online resources, we still don't understand how the Internet works‚ and we don't know what it is doing to us. It is this genesis of a brand new society, combined with almost complete ignorance, exposure and extreme dependency, which makes the Internet potentially so fatal. On the Web, we become our own doppelgangers. We peer over our shoulders into mirrors that create a double reflection: but so do governments, armies, corporations and terrorist groups. What do life, conflict and security mean, when a handful of passwords stand between us and a realm with no borders and infinite identities? What prevents credibility in our economy ("currency') from migrating from cash to information about cash‚ or about anything else of value, for that matter? What prevents the actual power of a democratic government from migrating from a Parliament or Congress to the information that underwrites that power? It is this kernel of blindness, our fundamental lack of understanding of what information now represents, which explains why the machines that use information leave us so vulnerable.
