HUMANITARIANS AND CYBERSECURITY CHALLENGES
Integrated systems help to boost bargaining power but the info is vulnerable to theft, writes
the need to negotiate access to and maintain acceptance in areas where people in need can reach you.
This region’s experiences with natural disasters in areas with ongoing insurgencies underscore the significance of this. Despite the impressive cessation of respective hostilities in northern Sri Lanka and Aceh following the 2004 Tsunami, the conflict still complicated people’s ability to reach aid immediately following the disaster. In Sri Lanka, this further deteriorated when the conflict reignited during the longer recovery phase.
In 2012, Typhoon Bopha swept through several areas of Mindanao, the Philippines, affected by low-intensity conflict between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. This included Marawi City, parts of which remain under the control of insurgents at the time of writing. This adds new complexity that humanitarians already face in negotiating access to populations in need, and would have clear relevance were a natural disaster to strike the area now.
Negotiating access in such contexts is more art than science. It involves convincing those with the power to block it that a humanitarian presence adds value in some way they consider significant, and will not provoke excessive negative side-effects.
Improved operational effectiveness born of better data technologies would, in most instances, help strengthen the case for allowing aid in. But, crucially, it might increase undesirable ancillary impacts.
There are three core humanitarian principles: impartiality, independence and neutrality. Together, independence and neutrality ground the case that the presence of a humanitarian organisation will not entail negative consequences to those with the power to block access.
Maintaining independence allows organisations to argue that their actions do not conform to anyone else’s agenda; neutrality ensures that humanitarian assistance and civilian protection will not advantage one side of a political disagreement or conflict.
As humanitarian organisations adopt new systems technologies to improve their collection, processing and analysis of information, the value of their assessments becomes increasingly strategic. Analyses of socio-political trends, actor networks and resource capabilities, as well as data on movements or key health indicators, could all represent actionable intelligence to other political actors.
As such, humanitarians become more tempting targets for cyberattacks. Several non-governmental organisations working in or on Syria are already believed to have been targeted by hackers seeking to harvest information they possess.
Thus, new integrated systems technologies create a paradox for negotiating access.
They strengthen a humanitarian organisation’s bargaining power. But, at the same time, they undermine neutrality by facilitating production of strategic intelligence that is vulnerable to theft.
Would those actors state and non-state in or on Aceh, Sri Lanka and Mindanao still consent to humanitarian access during a natural disaster or any other humanitarian emergency if they perceive a risk of aid agencies unwittingly leaking valuable information to their opponents?
Humanitarian organisations have hitherto not prioritised cybersecurity. Doing so requires expertise they generally do not possess, and redirecting resources away from aiding people directly.
Budgets are already stretched across simultaneous famine threats in South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen, and the largest global refugee burden since the World War II. But, cybersecurity cannot be ignored; it has implications on the vulnerability of those in need, and on organisations’ own ability to negotiate access.
In a world where even the most sophisticated of governments are unable to protect their data, the humanitarian community faces a real challenge.
Humanitarian organisations must carefully consider what data they collect. In each case, they must decide whether the value of collecting and processing any given data for improving their aid effectiveness is outweighed by the risk posed by its loss.
This loss could be both to individuals being assisted and to the organisation’s ability to maintain its negotiated access. This could result in discarding data that would otherwise be useful. Clearly, this will often be an extremely difficult calculation to make.
However, much of the promise held by new humanitarian data technologies depends on it.