The future of the internet
About the time Alexander Klimburg was finishing his exhaustively researched new book on the impact of cyberspace on inter-state conflict, the extent of the “extreme level” of Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign was just reaching a “fever pitch” (his words) and the world has been living with the fallout ever since.
Likely for the first time in history, a hostile foreign power likely effected the outcome of a democratic election through a combination of computer hacking and the insidious dissemination of what the Russians called “dez,” their abbreviation for disinformation. Most of us now know dez by its more popular Western sobriquet, “fake news.”
All of this insidious political manipulation was possible because of the emergence of internet technology as the critical element affecting not only how people communicate, or how the economy works, but also how states now wage wars, whether hot or cold, Klimburg argues.
Putin’s interference in the U.S. presidential election provided Klimburg with a classic case that enabled him to study a cold war battle in the Age of the Internet: it “weaponized” information to deadly effect, politically.
Of course, it’s not all the fault of the Russians. As Klimburg notes, the first recorded cyberattack on critical infrastructure occurred in 1981-82, when the CIA tricked the KGB into stealing Western pipeline technology that had been pro- grammed to turn malicious at a certain point.
Attacking critical infrastructure — power grids, banking data, etc. — will clearly be the front line in cyber warfare and there have been premonitions of what to expect. As Klimburg writes, “On the night of December 23, 2015, Ukraine became the first country to suffer a verified largescale cyber attack on its critical infrastructure. Over 225,000 Ukrainians lost their light and heating in the middle of winter when a cyberattack disabled part of the country’s power grid.” Scary.
Klimburg’s exploration of inter-state conflict in cyberspace is just one dimension of this complex, fascinating book.
Another is how the internet will develop over the coming years. And that’s critical to all of us because, quite simply, the internet has become like the air we breathe: it sustains modern life. Klimburg looks at the struggle to control the internet and whether this critical tool will remain “free and open” or be controlled by the state. In this struggle two factions are at loggerheads: the Cyber-sovereignty bloc, led by Russia and China, versus free internet adherents in the West. Will the internet morph into Big Brother — the Putin option — or will it remain an essential tool for mankind’s survival?
The 2016 election is a cautionary tale and just one reason why The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace is indispensable reading for anyone keen to understand what lies ahead as cyberspace displaces conventional battlefields as the preferred venue for resolving conflict. Robert Collison is a Toronto writer and editor.