Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace (2 page)

“Black” also refers to the criminal forces that are increasingly insinuating themselves into cyberspace, gradually subverting it from the inside out. The Internet’s original designers built a system of interconnection based on trust, and as beautiful as that original conception was, how it might be abused was never predicted, could not be predicted. One of the first Internet applications, email, was almost instantly hijacked by the persistent nuisance of spam. Each subsequent application has followed suit, and with the almost wholesale penetration of the Internet into homes, offices, governments, hospitals, and energy systems, the stakes are much higher, the consequences of those malignant forces much more serious. Those who take advantage of the Internet’s vulnerabilities
today are not just juvenile pranksters or frat house brats; they are organized criminal groups, armed militants, and nation states. Add to this mix the demographic shift that is occurring and the picture gets more frightening. Most of the world’s future Internet population will live in fragile, and in many cases corrupt, states.

And then there are the secretive worlds of national defence and intelligence agencies, as in “black ops,” “black budgets,” going “deep black” – worlds that have now become major players in cyberspace security and governance. The collection of three-letter agencies born alongside World War II (CIA, FBI, NSA, KGB, etc.) that became global behemoths during the Cold War may have seemed to be on the edge of extinction in the 1990s, but the combination of “big data” (the massive explosion of digital information in all of its forms), security threats, and the spectre of terrorism has created a power vortex into which these agencies, with their unique information-gathering capabilities, have stepped.

At the very moment when we are surrounded with so much access to information and apparent transparency, we are delegating responsibility for the security and governance of cyberspace to some of the world’s most secretive agencies. And just as we are entrusting so much information to third parties, we are also relaxing legal protections that restrict security agencies from accessing our private data, from investigating us. The title
Black Code
refers to the growing influence of national security agencies, and the expanding network of contractors and companies with whom they work.

•  •  •

The Internet began
with the spirit of “hope springs eternal.” Today, sadly, we live in a time of cyber phobia. Cyber espionage and warfare, the growing menaces of cyber crime and data breaches, and the rise of new social movements like WikiLeaks
and Anonymous have vaulted cyber security to the top of the international political agenda, at untold cost. Almost every day a new headline screams about a serious problem in cyberspace that demands immediate attention. There is a palpable urgency to act – to do something, anything.

As ominous as the dark side of cyberspace may be, our collective reaction may become the darkest driving force of all. Fear is becoming the dominant factor behind a movement to shape, control, and possibly subvert cyberspace, and “What begins in fear usually ends in folly,” as English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it.

We stand at a precipice where the great leap in human communication and ingenuity that gave us global cyberspace could continue to bind us together or deteriorate into something malign. Only by fully uncovering the battle for the future of cyberspace can we understand what’s at stake, and take steps to ensure that this degradation of one of humanity’s greatest innovations does not happen.

(An interesting sidebar to this discussion … “Mainstream media” are often criticized for only following horse races – elections, scandals, and so on – and for giving scant treatment to deep, difficult issues. Regarding cyberspace governance and security, I have actually found that mainstream outlets like the
New York Times, Bloomberg News, Wall Street Journal
, and others, have done, all things being equal, solid reporting and have been receptive to Citizen Lab investigations and reports. Even though the conceit in much of cyberspace is that media “organs of the establishment” are beholden to special interests and their advertisers, I have not found this to necessarily be the case. The more important matter is that if these issues are out there, reported on in the mainstream press, why are so few people paying attention?)

Look around you.
Do you see anyone peering into their smartphone? How many times have you checked your email today? Have you searched for a wifi café to do so? How many people have you texted? Maybe you’re a contrarian, don’t own a smartphone. You find all this “connectivity” to be a social menace that isolates people from the world around them, as they stare endlessly into the glow of their computer screens, or engage in loud conversations with invisible others as they walk down the street gesticulating. If your date answers that cellphone call all is lost, you think. The digital revolution is not all that it’s cracked up to be, you say, and you resist it.

Good luck with that.

Even those of you who resist or fear cyberspace sense that we are in the midst of an onslaught. And we are! You resist initially because it is drawing you in, inevitably. Whether you like it or not, to remain part of civil society you have to deal with it. Cyberspace is everywhere. By the end of 2012 there were more mobile devices on the planet than people: cellphones, laptops, tablets, gaming consoles, even Internet-connected cars. Some estimates put the number of Internet-connected devices now at 10 billion. Cyberspace has become what researchers call a “totally immersive environment,” a phenomenon that cannot be avoided or ignored, increasingly embedded in societies rich and poor,
a communications arena that does not discriminate.
Connectivity in Africa, for instance, grows at some 2,000 percent a year. While the digital divide remains deep, it’s shrinking fast, and access to cyberspace is growing much faster than good governance over it. Indeed, in many regions rapid connectivity is taking place in a context of chronic underemployment, disease, malnutrition, environmental stress, and failed or failing states.

Cyberspace is now an unavoidable reality that wraps our planet in a complex information and communications skin. It shapes our actions and choices and relentlessly drives us all closer together, drives us even towards those whom, all things being equal, we would rather keep at a distance. A shared space, a global commons, the public square writ large. You’ve heard all the ecstatic metaphors used by enthusiasts and your thoughts turn elsewhere. “Hell is other people,” Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote in
No Exit
, and now teeming billions of them are potentially in your living room, or at least in your email inbox, that silent assassin. You cherish your privacy.

Of course, there have been previous revolutions in communications technology that have upset the order of things and caused outrage and celebration. The alphabet, the invention of writing, the development of the printing press, the telegraph, radio, and television come to mind. But one of the many things that distinguishes cyberspace is the speed by which it has spread (and continues to spread). Those other technological innovations no doubt changed societies but in an “immersive” sense only over many generations, and more locally than not. Cyberspace, on the other hand, has connected two-thirds of the world – has joined, that is, more than 4 billion people in a single communications environment – in less than twenty years. And it is moving onward, accelerating in fact, bringing legions into its fold each and every day.

The amount of digital information now doubles every year, and the “information superhighway” might be best described as
continuous exponential growth, more on-ramps, more data, all the time, faster, more immediate, more accessible, its users always on, always connected. This speed and volume make getting a handle on the big picture difficult, and the truth is – a hideous truth, especially for those of you who think of yourselves as “off the grid,” somehow away from the connected world, and proudly disconnected – is that no one is immune. Let’s imagine for a moment that you don’t own a computer, have never sent an email or text, and don’t know what “app” means. The thing that informs you, that prepares you for cocktail parties and other gatherings, is mainstream or “old” media – newspapers, radio, and TV. Look closely at this “old media”: How much of it is now “informed by,” even directed by, “new media,” by thousands, even millions, of “citizen journalists,” unpaid, unaccountable, but with cellphone cameras permanently at the ready, documenting events as they happen in real time, unfiltered, and, perhaps, unreliable. The other truth is that no one really knows what this hurricane will leave behind or where it will take us. We’re just struggling to hang on.

Another chief difference between then and now is that today, through cyberspace, it is us, the users, who create the information, do the connecting, and sustain and grow this unique communications and technological ecosystem. Save for the telephone, previous communications revolutions required a certain passivity on the part of consumers. There was little or no interactivity. We turned on the radio and listened, watched television happy to tune out and not to have to respond. The information provided, even the news of the day, simply washed over us. (We might get a call from a ratings agency, might be polled, might write a letter to the editor, but in the main we were passive recipients not active participants.) Cyberspace is wholly different, and potentially far more egalitarian. It is the lonely man in a café clicking away, the mother out for dinner with friends discreetly contacting her kids, the armed
militant in Mogadishu, the criminal in Moscow, as much as it is anyone or any institution in particular, who feed the machine, cause it to grow, to envelop us further. While it is difficult to pin down a constantly moving target, this much can be said: it is peculiar to cyberspace that we, the users, shape it as much as we are shaped by it. We are at it every day, every night, transforming it all the while. Cyberspace is what we make of it. It is ours. We need to remember this before it slips through our grasp.

This remains the issue. One of the extraordinary – and for many liberating – things about cyberspace is that while massive and hugely profitable corporations like Apple and Google have made it possible and accessible (virtually) to all, they don’t actually control it. Indeed, while having seeded the terrain, Apple, Google, and other gigantic corporations might have no greater control over cyberspace than those of us operating alone, at home, at our computer screens. This generative quality changes everything, causes grave concern, causes many to demand that cyberspace be brought under control.

•  •  •

It’s difficult not to marvel
at the extraordinary benefits of cyberspace. To be able to publish anything and have it immediately reach a potential worldwide audience represents a democratization of communications that philosophers and science fiction writers have dreamed about for centuries. Families continents apart now share in each other’s daily struggles and triumphs. Physicians connect with patients thousands of kilometres away, in real time. Through vast aggregations of data we can now predict when disease outbreaks are likely to occur, and take precautionary measures. We can pinpoint our exact longitude and latitude, identify the nearest wifi hotspot, and notify a friend that we are, well, nearby and would like to meet.

But there is a dark side to all this connectivity: malicious threats that are growing from the inside out, a global disease with many symptoms that is buttressed by disparate and mutually reinforcing causes. Some of these forces are the unintended by-products of the digital universe into which we have thrust ourselves, mostly with blind acceptance. Others are more sinister, deliberate manipulations that exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities in cyberspace. Together they threaten to destroy the fragile ecosystem we have come to take for granted.

Social networking, cloud computing, and mobile forms of connectivity are convenient and fun, but they are also a dangerous brew. Data once stored on our actual desktops and in filing cabinets now evaporates into the “cloud,” entrusted to third parties beyond our control.
Few of us realize that data stored by Google, even data located on machines in foreign jurisdictions, are subject to the U.S. Patriot Act because Google is headquartered in the United States and the Act compels it to turn over data when asked to do so, no matter where it is stored. (For this reason, some European countries are debating laws that will ban public officials from using Google and/or other cloud computing services that could put their citizens’ personal information at risk.) Mobile connectivity and social networking might give us instant awareness of each other’s thoughts, habits, and activities, but in using them we have also entrusted an unprecedented amount of information about ourselves to private companies. We can now be tracked in time and space with a degree of precision that would make tyrants of days past envious – all by our own consent.
Mobile devices are what Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, author of
The Future of the Internet
, calls “tethered appliances”: they corral us into walled gardens controlled by others, with unknown repercussions.

These technological changes are occurring alongside a major demographic shift in cyberspace. The Internet may have been born
in the West but its future will almost certainly be decided elsewhere. North Americans and Europeans make up less than 25 percent of Internet users, and the West in general is almost at saturation point. Asia, on the other hand, comprises nearly 50 percent of the world’s Internet population (the most by region), and only 28 percent of its people are online (next to last by region). Some of the fastest growth is happening among the world’s weakest states, in zones of conflict where authoritarianism (or something close), mass youth unemployment, and organized crime prevail. How burgeoning populations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America will use and shape cyberspace is an open question.