A world of virtual honour killings and Internet asylum seekers
The upshot is a book packed with predictions on issues such as the future of states, revolution, terrorism, conflict, combat, citizenship and identity.
Familiar concepts and language of the old civilization are extrapolated to the new — producing fresh and often startling concepts that will cause the most diehard digerati to reflect deeply, yet will still be accessible to anyone who cares about the future.
It is a dizzying and disturbing future. Get ready for:
Virtual honour killings. Identity, a citizen’s most valuable asset, will exist primarily online. In deeply conservative societies where social shame can be devastating, we could see a kind of “virtual honour killing” — dedicated efforts to ru- in a person’s online identity, with material real or fabricated. In some cultures this might lead a young woman’s family to kill her. Already teenage girls in North America have committed suicide after being smeared by their peers online.
Balkanization. Imagine if a country or even a group of deeply religious Sunnimajority countries — say Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria and Mauritania — decided to build a “Sunni web.” While still part of the larger Internet, it would become the main source of information, news, history and activity for citizens living in these countries. Their web would be constrained and limited to a narrow point of view.
Internet asylum seekers. A dissident who can’t live freely under one country’s autocratic Internet and is refused access to other states’ Internets will choose to seek physical asylum in another country to gain a virtually unimpeded freedom on its Internet.
Virtual sovereignty and statehood. Hounded in both the physical and virtual worlds, groups that lack formal statehood may choose to emulate it online. This opportunity to establish sovereignty virtually may well be a meaningful step to actual statehood. The Kurdish populations in Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq might build a Kurdish web as a way to carve out a sort of virtual independence.
Virtual multilateralism. Authoritarian states like Belarus, Eritrea, Zimbabwe and North Korea — outcasts all — would benefit from joining an autocratic cyber-union, where censorship, monitoring strategies and technologies could be shared.
A new data permanence. What is tweeted, blogged or written on someone’s Facebook wall can never fully be stricken. This data permanence is an intractable challenge, but the type of political system and level of government control will determine its impact. In an open democracy, it will be a free-for-all in the short term.
Cyber terrorism and war. Terrorist groups and states will make use of cyberwar tactics, though they will focus on information-gathering rather than outright destruction. Stealing trade secrets, accessing classified information, infiltrating government systems, disseminating misinformation — traditional intelligence agency ploys — will make up the bulk of cyber attacks between states.
Online vigilantism. We will see online mobs seeking individuals by sharing photos and descriptions of criminal or marginal behaviour, just as some newspapers wrongly pointed the finger at innocent bystanders in a frenzied quest to be the first to identify the Boston Marathon bombers.
A “digital caste system” where “people’s experience will be greatly determined by where they fall in the structure.” The tiny minority at the top will be largely insulated from the downside of technology by their wealth or location. The two billion already connected are the world’s middle class. The next five billion will receive the greatest benefits and the worst drawbacks.
The book will stimulate debate, which is good.
Consider the issue of privacy. The authors fiercely defend privacy as a human right, but are pessimistic that it can be maintained. Among the reasons is that political hawks wait for terrifying inci-
dents, such as the Boston Marathon bombs, to ratchet up their demands for cyber oversight. This legitimizes activities such as data mining, which sifts through our digital bread crumbs — phone calls, Internet browsing history, Google searches, bank records, credit card purchases and medical records — to inspect and predict our behaviour. Apple admitted this week that it stores Siri searches for two years. Google does the same.
The irresistible benefits of the virtual world are such that we voluntarily relinquish things we value in the physical world, like privacy, personal information and even security. Some might choose to live “off the cyber grid,” boycott the digital world, and live a quiet and simple life. Governments will soon view such behaviour as suspicious, and will build registries of citizens who behave so oddly. Your non-cyber behaviour will attract cyber scrutiny.
To be sure, we’re all giving away more information than we have in the past and governments and corporations everywhere are motivated to collect and exploit as much data as they can. But there are workable policies and approaches that individuals and institutions can take to defend this basic right. I wish the authors had talked to Ontario’s privacy commis- sioner, Ann Cavoukian, to learn about her Privacy by Design concept, which has attracted many supporters.
It argues that privacy cannot be assured solely by compliance with laws; that it is the responsibility of every organization to make it its default modus operandi. The concept argues for a set of principles that can enable individuals to defend privacy and control over their personal information, help companies gain a sustainable competitive advantage and ensure that governments don’t lose trust. Rather than predicting a glum future, why not advocate for an approach that could achieve a different one?
THE BOOK also discusses copyright and piracy as if the intellectual property laws of the physical world are completely sensible and automatically applicable to the new world. Rather than making the case to completely revamp our laws, which I think is required, the authors side with the corporations and governments that demonize our music-downloading children as pirates. Since Canada didn’t fully adopt the flawed World Intellectual Property Organization’s 1996 treaty, Canada is “a haven for Internet piracy.”
A book addressing foreign affairs seems incomplete without a chapter on global co-operation, problem solving and governance. It’s a perfect arena for the authors to develop their core thesis. The physical world has a set of global institutions that came out of the Bretton Woods agreements after the Second World War — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the UN and others, culminating in the G8 and G20. These institutions are increasingly ineffective. Contrast these to the new multi-stakeholder networks based on the Internet, where tens of millions of people are co-operating to solve problems in new ways.
Schmidt and Cohen are hopeful. “We believe the vast majority of the world will be net beneficiaries of connectivity, experiencing greater efficiency and opportunities and an improved quality of life.” They provide ample evidence that the arc of history is a positive one and toward freedom. “In the long run the presence of communications technologies will chip away at the most autocratic governments . . . it’s no coincidence that today’s autocracies are the least connected societies in the world.”
I’m hopeful, too. But I must confess after reading this disturbing book I’m struck anew by the enormity of the challenge to ensure that this smaller world our children inherit is a better one.