Has the internet become a failed state?
The internet was once a land of promise, with few fears about crime or privacy. Thirty years on, scammers, thieves and spies have created a place of chaos
John Naughton
The Guardian
Sunday 27 November 2016 07.59 GMT
Here are some stories about the world we now inhabit…
• In February this year, Bangladesh Bank was hit by the biggest bank robbery in history when thieves got away with $101m. The heist was accomplished not by tunnels or explosives, but by acquiring the access codes for the Swift global messaging system, which is what banks use to securely pass payment orders to one another. The criminals used Swift to instruct the US Federal Reserve to transfer money to their accounts. Then they cunningly erased their digital fingerprints by modifying the bank’s software.
• In June 2015, the US Office of Personnel Management revealed that its computer systems had been hacked and that the hackers had stolen the social security numbers, names, dates and places of birth, and addresses of 21.5 million people, including some who had undergone background checks for sensitive government posts.
• In October 2015, nearly 157,000 customers of the UK telco TalkTalk had their personal data stolen in a massive intrusion into the company’s computer systems. Police later arrested six teenage boys in connection with this cyber attack.
• In the past two years, hospitals worldwide have found themselves on the receiving end of a vicious type of cyber attack. Medical staff suddenly find that their hospital’s computer systems are locked and inaccessible to them because they have been secretly infiltrated. They then receive a message telling them that their data will be unlocked on payment of a ransom in Bitcoins. The European police agency Europol now reckons that the threat from “ransomware” has eclipsed all other forms of online theft and extortion.
Over the past year, someone has been probing the defences of the companies that run critical pieces of the internet
• Two months ago, a young Italian woman killed herself because she was traumatised by online abuse after an intimate video that she had sent to a friend was widely “shared” across the web. As soon as the images went viral, she was subjected to jeering comments, Photoshopped screenshots and cruel parodies that, in the end, tipped her over the edge.
• In June, it was revealed that two agencies of the Russian government had hacked into the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee. Shortly before the Democratic convention that nominated Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails and attachments stolen during the breach, some of which were distinctly unhelpful to Clinton and useful to Donald Trump.
• On 21 October, a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks caused widespread disruption of internet activity in the US. The attacks involved directing huge amounts of bogus traffic at servers belonging to Dyn, a company that is a major provider of domain name services (DNS) to other companies. For a time this severely affected major websites – including Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, Tumblr, Spotify, PayPal, Verizon, Comcast and the PlayStation network. The attack was conducted using a huge botnet of unsecured “internet of things” devices such as home webcams and broadband routers.
• According to Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert, over the past year or so, someone has been probing the defences of the companies that run critical pieces of the internet. These probes, Schneier says, “take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China or Russia would be my first guesses.”
It didn’t used to be like this. In the first decade after the internet we use today was switched on, in January 1983, cyberspace was a brave new world – a glorious sandpit for geeks and computer science researchers. There was, in that magical virtual world, no crime, no spam, no commercial activity and little concern about security – largely because “netizens” (for that is what they were called) knew one another, or at least knew what their institutional affiliations were. Discussion groups (then called newsgroups) were formed around every conceivable topic, no matter how arcane. (Early on, there was a vigorous argument about whether there should be a discussion group on sex, and when one finally appeared, someone else insisted that logically there should therefore also be newsgroups on drugs and rock’n’roll. So those were set up too.) Codes of conduct, etiquette and social norms evolved to regulate – or at least moderate – online behaviour, reduce “flame wars”, and so on. It was, in a way, a kind of wonderland, and it gave rise to the techno-utopianism embodied in John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of the independence of cyberspace”, which began: “Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather...”
What it came down to was this: in the decade 1983-93, cyberspace and “meatspace” (Barlow’s term for the real, physical world) were effectively parallel universes. They existed side by side, and for the most part the inhabitants of meatspace knew nothing of the virtual world.
But from 1993 onwards, all that began to change. The main catalysts were the world wide web, the Mosaic browser and AOL. The web provided non-geeks with an answer to the question: what is this internet thing for? Mosaic, the first modern browser, showed them what the web could do and, more importantly, what it could become. Demand for access to the internet exploded. AOL met the demand by providing a reliable, easy-to-configure, dial-up service for millions of people, and so brought the “redneck hordes” – ie people unfamiliar with the mores and customs of the netizen era – on to the internet. Scenting profits, companies and pornographers scrambled for a piece of the action, closely followed by scammers and spammers and all kinds of other undesirables.
The result was that the parallel universes gradually merged, and we wound up with the composite networked world we now inhabit – a world that has the affordances of both cyberspace and meatspace. Which helps to explain why we are having such trouble coming to terms with it.
This blended universe is a strange place, simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. It provides its users – ordinary citizens – with services, delights and opportunities that were once the prerogative only of the rich and powerful. Wikipedia, the greatest store of knowledge the world has ever seen, is available at the click of a mouse. Google has become the memory prosthesis for humanity. Services such as Skype and FaceTime shrink intercontinental distances for families and lovers. And so on.
But at the same time, everything we do on the network is monitored and surveilled by both governments and the huge corporations that now dominate cyberspace. (If you want to see the commercial side of this in action, install Ghostery in your browser and see who’s snooping on you as you surf.) Internet users are assailed by spam, phishing, malware, fraud and identity theft. Corporate and government databases are routinely hacked and huge troves of personal data, credit card and bank account details are stolen and offered for sale in the shadows of the so-called “dark web”. Companies – and public institutions such as hospitals – are increasingly blackmailed by ransomware attacks, which make their essential IT systems unusable unless they pay a ransom. Cybercrime has already reached alarming levels and, because it largely goes unpunished, will continue to grow – which is why in some societies old-style physical crime is reducing as practitioners move to the much safer and more lucrative online variety.
“All human life is there” was once the advertising slogan for the now-defunct News of the World. It was never true of that particular organ, which specialised mostly in tales of randy vicars, celebrity love triangles, the foolishness of lottery winners and similar dross. But it is definitely true of the internet, which caters for every imaginable human interest, taste and obsession. One way of thinking about the net is as a mirror held up to human nature. Some of what appears in the mirror is inspiring and heart-warming. Much of what goes on online is enjoyable, harmless, frivolous, fun. But some of it is truly repellent: social media, in particular, facilitate firestorms of cruelty, racism, hatred and hypocrisy – as liberals who oppose the Trump campaign in the US have recently discovered. For a crash course in this darker side of human nature, read Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and weep.
So we find ourselves living in this paradoxical world, which is both wonderful and frightening. Social historians will say that there’s nothing new here: the world was always like this. The only difference is that we now experience it 24/7 and on a global scale. But as we thrash around looking for a way to understand it, our public discourse is depressingly Manichean: tech boosters and evangelists at one extreme; angry technophobes at the other; and most of us somewhere in between. Small wonder that Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace, once described our condition as that of “informed bewilderment”.
One way of combating this bewilderment is to look for metaphors. The idea of the net as a mirror held up to human nature is one. But recently people have been looking for others. Sean Gallagher, the IT editor of Ars Technica, for example, reaches for an urban reference. “In the New York City of the late 1970s,” he writes, “things looked bad. The city government was bankrupt, urban blight was rampant, and crime was high. But people still went to the city every day, because that was where everything was happening. And despite the foreboding feelings hanging over New York at the time, the vast majority of those people had at most minor brushes with crime.”
“Today,” he continues, “we all dabble in some place that looks a lot like 1970s New York City – the internet. (For those needing a more recent simile, think the Baltimore of The Wire.) Low-level crime remains rampant, while increasingly sophisticated crime syndicates go after big scores. There is a cacophony of hateful speech, vice of every kind... and policemen of various sorts trying to keep a lid on all of it – or at least trying to keep the chaos away from most law-abiding citizens. But people still use the internet every day, though the ones who consider themselves street smart do so with varying levels of defences installed. Things sort of work...”
They do. But the weakness of the NYC metaphor is that the city was eventually cleaned up and a kind of order restored. So in that sense, it’s an unrealistic, optimistic scenario for the net. Consequently, those who fear that humanity will struggle to get a grip on cyberspace reach for more alarming metaphors. Could it, for example, become some kind of “failed state” like contemporary Somalia, with, as Gallagher puts it, “warring factions destroying the most fundamental of services, ‘security zones’ reducing or eliminating free movement, and security costs making it prohibitive for anyone but the most well-funded operations to do business without becoming a ‘soft target’ for political or economic gain”?
Our dilemma is that while the future of cyberspace is unknowable, we need to think about it because it affects us all
The Fragile States Index, an annual report published by the US thinktank the Fund for Peace and the magazine Foreign Policy, defines a fragile state as one “whose central government is so weak or ineffective that it has little practical control over much of its territory; non-provision of public services; widespread corruption and criminality; refugees and involuntary movement of populations and sharp economic decline”.
Some, but not all, of this maps neatly on to cyberspace. There is, for example, no central government that has effective control over the network’s “territory” (though the US, for historical reasons, has had more influence over it than any other nation, much to the annoyance of the Russians and the Chinese). In fact, one of the central problems posed by the network is that it is a global system in a Westphalian world of sovereign states and local laws.
Our dilemma is that while the future of cyberspace is unknowable, we need to think about it because it affects us all. The standard method that large corporations and governments use for this purpose is by imagining a set of possible futures or scenarios and assessing the implications of each one. The aim is not to “predict” the future, but to try and sketch the range of possibilities that we might have to deal with.
As far as cyberspace is concerned, the most interesting set of scenarios I’ve seen come from a US thinktank, the Atlantic Council. Its analyst, Jason Healey, sets out five candidates:
• Status quo: a continuation of what we now have. “Cyberspace is generally a safe place in which to do business and to communicate with others, even though criminals continue to engage in multimillion-dollar heists and steal millions of people’s personal details; national foreign intelligence agencies poke and prod for military and industrial secrets.”
• Conflict domain: essentially an extrapolation of the militarisation of cyberspace that we are already seeing – a world in which cyberwarfare becomes common.
• Balkanisation: cyberspace has broken into national fiefdoms: there is no single internet, just a collection of national internets.
• Paradise: cyberspace becomes an overwhelmingly secure place where espionage, warfare and crime are rare.
• Cybergeddon: cyberspace degenerates into a virtual failed state with all that that implies. Think modern-day Mogadishu.
Some of these are more implausible than others. Healey’s “paradise” scenario is pure fantasy. And the power of internet corporations – plus the reach and dominance of national intelligence agencies such as the NSA – suggest that some kind of (possibly repressive) order would be restored long before “cybergeddon” would be reached.
So we’re left with two real possibilities – some blend of Balkanisation and inter-state conflict, both extrapolations of trends that we can already observe.
If this is indeed how things pan out, I know one scholar, a distinguished professor of international relations, who won’t be in the least surprised. Sixteen years ago, in a conversation about the internet, he asked me if I really believed that the internet represented a fundamental challenge to established power structures. I replied vehemently in the affirmative – because, in my techno-utopian fervour, I did believe. He smiled but said nothing, and so eventually I asked him what he thought. “We’ll see, dear boy,” he replied. “We’ll see.
He’s still around, as wise as ever. And I am a recovering utopian.
scammers
swindler , defrauder , chiseller , chiseler , gouger , scammer , grifter (noun) - a person who swindles you by means of deception or fraud
heist
burglarize , burglarise , burgle , heist (verb) - commit a burglary; enter and rob a dwelling, heist , rip-off (noun) - the act of stealing ,armed robbery , heist , holdup , stickup (noun) - robbery at gunpoint
ransom , ransom money (noun) - money demanded for the return of a captured person
reckon , count (verb) - take account of; "You have to reckon with our opponents"; "Count on the monsoon"
traumatised
traumatize , traumatise , shock (verb) - inflict a trauma upon
jeering
jeer , scoff , flout , barrack , gibe (verb) - laugh at with contempt and derision; "The crowd jeered at the speaker"
jeer , jeering , mockery , scoff , scoffing (noun) - showing your contempt by derision
breach
transgress , offend , infract , violate , go against , breach , break (verb) - act in disregard of laws, rules, contracts, or promises; "offend all laws of humanity"; "violate the basic laws or human civilization"; "break a law"; "break a promise"
gap , breach (verb) - make an opening or gap in
breach (noun) - a failure to perform some promised act or obligation
breach (noun) - an opening (especially a gap in a dike or fortification)
rupture , breach , break , severance , rift , falling out (noun) - a personal or social separation (as between opposing factions); "they hoped to avoid a break in relations"
disruption
break , interruption , disruption , gap (noun) - an act of delaying or interrupting the continuity; "it was presented without commercial breaks"; "there was a gap in his account"
disturbance , disruption , commotion , flutter , hurly burly , to-do , hoo-ha , hoo-hah , kerfuffle (noun) - a disorderly outburst or tumult; "they were amazed by the furious disturbance they had caused"
dislocation , disruption (noun) - an event that results in a displacement or discontinuity
disruption , perturbation (noun) - the act of causing disorder
bogus
bogus , fake , phony , phoney , bastard (adjective) - fraudulent; having a misleading appearance
calibrated
calibrate , graduate , fine-tune (verb) - make fine adjustments or divide into marked intervals for optimal measuring; "calibrate an instrument"; "graduate a cylinder"
calibrate (verb) - mark (the scale of a measuring instrument) so that it can be read in the desired units; "he calibrated the thermometer for the Celsius scale"
calibrate (verb) - measure the caliber of; "calibrate a gun"
calibrated , graduated (adjective) - marked with or divided into degrees; "a calibrated thermometer"
sandpit
sandpit (noun) - a large pit in sandy ground from which sand is dug
geeks
geek (noun) - a carnival performer who does disgusting acts
eccentric , eccentric person , flake , oddball , geek (noun) - a person with an unusual or odd personality
arcane
arcane (adjective) - requiring secret or mysterious knowledge; "the arcane science of dowsing"
wonderland
wonderland (noun) - a place or scene of great or strange beauty or wonder
wonderland (noun) - an imaginary realm of marvels or wonders
mosaic , tessellated (adjective) - decorated with small pieces of colored glass or stone fitted together; "a mosaic floor"; "a tessellated pavement"
configure
configure (verb) - set up for a particular purpose; "configure my new computer"; "configure a plane for a combat mission"
mores
mores (noun) - (sociology) the conventions that embody the fundamental values of a group
pornographers
pornographer , porn merchant (noun) - someone who presents shows or sells writing or pictures that are sexually explicit in violation of the community mores
spammers
spammer (noun) - someone who sends unwanted email (often in bulk)
prerogative
prerogative , privilege , perquisite , exclusive right (noun) - a right reserved exclusively by a particular person or group (especially a hereditary or official right); "suffrage was the prerogative of white adult males"
prosthesis
prosthesis , prosthetic device (noun) - corrective consisting of a replacement for a part of the body
snooping
spy , stag , snoop , sleuth (verb) - watch, observe, or inquire secretly
lucrative
lucrative , moneymaking , remunerative (adjective) - producing a sizeable profit; "a remunerative business"
defunct
dead , defunct (adjective) - no longer in force or use; inactive; "a defunct (or dead) law"; "a defunct organization"
defunct (adjective) - having ceased to exist or live; "the will of a defunct aunt"; "a defunct Indian tribe"
randy
aroused , horny , randy , ruttish , steamy , turned on(p) (adjective) - feeling great sexual desire; "feeling horny"
vicars
vicar (noun) - a Roman Catholic priest who acts for another higher-ranking clergyman
vicar (noun) - (Episcopal Church) a clergyman in charge of a chapel
vicar (noun) - (Church of England) a clergyman appointed to act as priest of a parish
obsession
compulsion , obsession (noun) - an irrational motive for performing trivial or repetitive actions against your will
obsession , fixation (noun) - an unhealthy and compulsive preoccupation with something or someone
frivolous
frivolous (adjective) - not serious in content or attitude or behavior; "a frivolous novel"; "a frivolous remark"; "a frivolous young woman"
paradoxical
paradoxical , self-contradictory (adjective) - seemingly contradictory but nonetheless possibly true; "it is paradoxical that standing is more tiring than walking"
technophobes
technophobe (noun) - a person who dislikes or avoids new technology
bewilderment
bewilderment , obfuscation , puzzlement , befuddlement , mystification , bafflement , bemusement (noun) - confusion resulting from failure to understand
rampant
rampant (adjective) - unrestrained and violent; "rampant aggression"
rampant(ip) , rearing (adjective) - rearing on left hind leg with forelegs elevated and head usually in profile; "a lion rampant"
rampant (adjective) - (of a plant) having a lush and unchecked growth; "a rampant growth of weeds"
foreboding
predict , foretell , prognosticate , call , forebode , anticipate , promise (verb) - make a prediction about; tell in advance; "Call the outcome of an election"
foreboding , premonition , presentiment , boding (noun) - a feeling of evil to come; "a steadily escalating sense of foreboding"; "the lawyer had a presentiment that the judge would dismiss the case"
foreboding (noun) - an unfavorable omen
fateful , foreboding(a) , portentous (adjective) - ominously prophetic
dabble
dabble (verb) - dip a foot or hand briefly into a liquid
dabble , paddle , splash around (verb) - play in or as if in water, as of small children
dabble , smatter , play around (verb) - work with in an amateurish manner; "She dabbles in astronomy"; "He plays around with investments but he never makes any money"
cacophony
blare , blaring , cacophony , clamor , din (noun) - a loud harsh or strident noise
cacophony (noun) - loud confusing disagreeable sounds
prod
nudge , poke at , prod (verb) - to push against gently; "She nudged my elbow when she saw her friend enter the restaurant"
prod , incite , egg on (verb) - urge on; cause to act; "They other children egged the boy on, but he did not want to throw the stone through the window"
jab , prod , stab , poke , dig (verb) - poke or thrust abruptly; "he jabbed his finger into her ribs"
goad , goading , prod , prodding , urging , spur , spurring (noun) - a verbalization that encourages you to attempt something; "the ceaseless prodding got on his nerves"
prod , goad (noun) - a pointed instrument that is used to prod into a state of motion
extrapolation
extrapolation (noun) - (mathematics) calculation of the value of a function outside
the range of known values
fiefdoms
fiefdom (noun) - the domain controlled by a feudal lord
fiefdom (noun) - an organization that is controlled by a dominant person or group
overwhelmingly
overwhelmingly , overpoweringly , irresistibly (adverb) - incapable of being resisted; "the candy looked overwhelmingly desirable to the dieting man"
espionage
espionage (noun) - the systematic use of spies to get military or political secrets
degenerates
devolve , deteriorate , drop , degenerate (verb) - grow worse; "Her condition deteriorated"; "Conditions in the slums degenerated"; "The discussion devolved into a shouting match"
pervert , deviant , deviate , degenerate (noun) - a person whose behavior deviates from what is acceptable especially in sexual behavior
implausible
implausible (adjective) - having a quality that provokes disbelief; "gave the teacher an implausible excuse"
farfetched , implausible (adjective) - highly imaginative but unlikely; "a farfetched excuse"; "an implausible explanation"
extrapolation (noun) - an inference about the future (or about some hypothetical situation) based on known facts and observations
vehemently
vehemently (adverb) - in a vehement manner; "he vehemently denied the accusations against him"
fervour
excitement , excitation , inflammation , fervor , fervour (noun) - the state of being emotionally aroused and worked up; "his face was flushed with excitement and his hands trembled"; "he tried to calm those who were in a state of extreme inflammation"
ardor , ardour , fervor , fervour , fervency , fire , fervidness (noun) - feelings of great warmth and intensity; "he spoke with great ardor"
