For and Against: Cyber security

I think that President Obama is right. It is right and proper that the whole issue of cyber security be brought front and centre, irrespective of political considerations. The reason for this is that the communications infrastructure, of which the Internet is the absolute central component, underlies our way of life in the 21st century. The acceleration that the Internet provides pervades everything from business and banking to sending messages to our relatives in different corners of the earth. When it comes to being in a war, the images we see coming out of Syria and other hotspots are very 20th century. For post-industrial civilisations such as western Europe, north America and much of Asia, from the standpoint of gaining power on a nationwide level it is much more important to be able to shut down - or even better control - their modes of communication.

There are three ways that you can exert power. The first and most crude way to do this is by direct force: in other words, if you don’t do what I want you to do I’m going to hit you with this stick, shoot you with this gun or blow you up with this bomb.

The second way, which is a little more sophisticated, is to limit access to certain things such as travel and communications. The most elegant way of exerting power is to limit people’s access to freedoms without their knowing that you are doing it: subversion, if you like.

In the context of the Internet, the first option is simply to destroy it physically, by wrecking the hardware or gumming it up with malware. The second way is the Great Firewall of China, where governments try to restrict people’s ability to communicate through social networks. Finally, and most dangerously, you subvert the Internet by gaining control in some way so you can control and distort the transfer of information in your target country: your enemy, if you like.

The first two ways we are already familiar with, but when it comes to subverting the Internet nobody really knows for sure what will happen. We know that there are individuals and governments out there trying to subvert the Internet. And of course we only know about the efforts that have failed.

For these reasons I think that the major wars to come will not be fought with nuclear weapons or machine guns. They will be information wars. President Obama is correct in drawing attention to this fact and to call for a major effort to what is in effect policing the Internet.

Now I don’t believe that the Internet as we know it is going to be around for ever. Ultimately people are going to come around to the idea that we have to put in place a new system designed from the ground up to be secure against the kinds of threats the President is commenting on.

One of the questions that needs to be addressed is how your opponent - another country or a non-governmental group - could gain control of the Internet and surreptitiously restrict access. This might be achieved through distorting financial transactions. But if this becomes endemic and random it can undermine our ways of doing business.

How many of these things need to happen before it starts to show? We can’t be sure, but there are people working in cyber-security running computer simulations of ways in which the Internet can be attacked and what the impact will be. Attacks might not have to be as dramatic as you’d assume before people start to get unnerved. If financial distortions happen, it is only a matter of time before people lose trust in the financial system with the result that people no longer put money in banks or transfer it electronically. And before long you’ll be going back to a life where you have physical cash in your hand and a society that no longer trusts its government. This will mean the potential regression to a very primitive transaction society: we could go from a post-industrial way of looking at the world to an agrarian economy overnight. And if this happens through a subversion of the Internet then we will be allowing other people to call the shots.