Google and Microsoft in Uganda
Google has launched “Google Trader” as part of its new SMS offering in Uganda – a service to facilitate marketplace transactions, particularly in agriculture.
Not surprisingly, a quick scan of Microsoft’s efforts in Africa reveals a slightly different focus – refurbishment and provisioning of PCs (particularly in Uganda), training for the government sector, work with international institutions like the UNHCR.
One can’t help but notice the superficial but potentially telling differences, and ask whether they’re reflective of the larger Google v. Microsoft story, which itself reflects deeper questions about the evolution of the IT. A scan of Google’s blog surfaces several references to volunteer efforts, to training local developers, to initiatives that embed in the daily cultural and economic milieu. Microsoft’s stories seem…well, larger (e.g., a new software package for an country’s educational sector), institutional, more “traditional” in terms of both technology and aid. There’s no dispute over the good, even the necessity of both approaches. But one can’t help but wonder if their evolution will tell a larger story about how the world will compute in the next fifty years.
School of Hack (Chinese version)
Courtesy of Fergie’s Tech Blog: this report on the $34.8M “hacker training” industry in China, derived from this China Daily story. The China Daily piece also cites $1B in losses in China in 2008 due to cybercrime, attributed to theft from personal accounts.
Not really convinced that you would get a lot out of course that runs maybe $30 … maybe access to a few tools that can be clumsily deployed, absent any other skills. The math is interesting – at the thirty-dollar rate, $34.8M buys you over a million “courses.” Assume for a moment that the courses are in Chinese (could be wrong there)…with a total combined Internet user population in China and Taiwan of ~300M, and assuming one course = one user, that’s not a bad rate of penetration. It’s a rate roughly equivalent to Amazon’s share of the U.S. retail market.
I previously referenced this Bloggingheads discussion between Evgeny Morozov and Ethan Zuckerman on cyberwar. Listen about midway through or check out Evgeny’s previous Slate article for a description of how a non-expert can get access to the right tools fairly easily.
Military robots and ethics – more debate, but still missing some questions?
In the BBC’s top technology stories tonight: a University of Sheffield professor of artificial intelligence states that a military robot’s ability to distinguish friend from foe reliably is still 50 years away, meaning that the technology needs restraint while the ethics catch up.
Regardless of whether it’s fifteen or fifty years, Moore’s Law practically mandates that the technology will outrace ethics and policies, absent a multinational commitment to constrain it. There are questions beyond rules of engagement as exercised by a semi-autonomous or autonomous robot – for instance, whether controllers, safely ensconced hundreds or thousands of miles away, constitute legitimate military targets. All such questions point to a grave potential – the probability that the growing use of robots could encourage rather than inhibit war, and expand the domain of the battlefield to include more civilians.
The same questions have been raised when it comes to cybersecurity, leading some to raise the idea of an international convention. If it comes about, it might need to aim at a larger ambition – to understand, and then govern automation as it advances and is applied to war.
Journos, poseurs, and spies
Seems like the Defcon and Black Hat conferences are ground-zero for spies with an information-warfare bent: this report from Computerworld discusses the ejection of four South Koreans apparently posing as journalists at Defcon. Any article that name-checks the Mossad and the French Foreign Legion in the same paragraph is worth reading.
Cyberwar and civil damage
From the front page of Sunday’s NY Times: the outlines of a continuing debate around the broader, unintended consequences of cyberwar.
This curious section appears about midway through the piece:
But some military strategists argue that these uncertainties have led to excess caution on the part of Pentagon planners.
“Policy makers are tremendously sensitive to collateral damage by virtual weapons, but not nearly sensitive enough to damage by kinetic” — conventional — “weapons,” said John Arquilla, an expert in military strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “The cyberwarriors are held back by extremely restrictive rules of engagement.”
Despite analogies that have been drawn between biological weapons and cyberweapons, Mr. Arquilla argues that “cyberweapons are disruptive and not destructive.”
This seems odd, given Arquilla’s previously articulated concerns over “a grave and growing capacity for crippling our tech-dependent society [which] has risen unchecked,” and his advocacy for arms control in this area. Granted, he’s careful to distinguish “mass disruption” from “mass destruction,” but the line between mass disruption and simple destruction seems blurry. There would seem to be a great deal of nuance in advocating international controls on the one hand, and less restrictive rules of engagement on the other.
He does raise a point about interpretative differences as applied to both conventional and cyberweapons. Should there be a difference, especially if the full extent of collateral effects are unknown? The case study here might be electrical infrastructure – especially since it’s been featured so prominently in Department of Homeland Security arguments. As the LA Times has noted, the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2003 deliberately avoided attacks on electrical infrastructure – a significant change from the 1991 campaign, and its second- and third-order effects. If an attack on information networks has the same effect on electrical infrastructure as a conventional attack, should it be governed by the same rules? Or if it has the same second- and third-order effects as an attack on electrical infrastructure – regardless of whether or not the electrical infrastructure is targeted – should it be governed the same?
Underlying this debate is the simple trend towards a more integrated world, in material, communications, and social networks. It’s not a flat world by any measure, but the wiring continues to be put in place. As that happens it’s going to be even more difficult to separate warfare from its effects on civil society. So it’s important that this debate continue – to ensure, at a minimum, that the use of information systems to conduct war works to inhibit rather than encourage war.
Pakistan upgrades targeting from Google Earth
From yesterday’s NY Times: Pakistan improves precision targeting by moving from Google Earth to more precise image sources. Which means Google Earth is a fairly sophisticated fallback option if these new image sources fail.
Principles for defining cyberwar – a modest proposal
After re-reading yesterday’s link from Wired, I’m more convinced that it’s time to set a more precise definition for “cyberwar,” before the term gets further muddled, misused, and manipulated by politicians. These aren’t necessarily new – the issue’s been under debate in military legal circles since at least the mid-’90s – but hype and consequences seem to be outracing the debate.
Principle #1: A better definition of “cyberwar” should seek to inhibit rather than encourage war. Let’s start with the idea that “cyberwar” will include a set of acts, perpetuated through information systems, that by themselves legitimate an armed response. If we hope to limit armed conflict – and preserve the Internet as a forum for dialogue – we have a responsibility to keep the set of acts constituting “cyberwar” to a carefully limited domain. Which means…
Principle #2: It isn’t cyberwar unless it’s war. References to the “digital Pearl Harbor” scenario – some of which are oddly reminiscent of Y2K fears – tend to paint a picture of cybercrime on a massive, anarchic scale. Take this excerpt from a 2000 article in the Air & Space Power Journal. It’s worth quoting in its entirety:
“One step higher in the conflict spectrum is the situation where a government agent actually denied services, corrupted data, or placed alternate data in the target country’s computer system, resulting in a shutdown of that country’s infrastructure assets (loss of power, utilities, air traffic control, etc.) potentially causing chaos and death in the target nation. We have now undoubtedly entered the arena of offensive Information Warfare (IW). Although no bombs or missiles have been dropped or launched, the target country has suffered actual, tangible damage. It would be difficult, indeed, to convince the targeted country that they were not under attack. Most likely, the “victim” state would believe that they had the authority (and perhaps a “duty”) to defend themselves under the authority of Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. Surely most victim countries would perceive this as an “act of war,” “use of force,” or “act of aggression,” or whatever terminology they decided would best serve to justify their retaliatory action. Academic debate of semantics would abruptly end when news programs could broadcast images of the tangible results such as aircraft wreckage, starving city dwellers, hospital intensive care units without power, riots, et cetera, and negative attention would turn toward the aggressor state.”
The word on which this excerpt turns is in the third line: ”…potentially causing chaos and death…” It’s a dangerous qualifier. It does seem sensible to include within the realm of “cyberwar” those acts which cause death and chaos, as long as we can precisely define chaos in terms of state sovereignty. But that word “potentially” tends to loosen the causation link between the act and the consequence. “Potentially” takes us away from [U-boat blockade = British starvation] to [financial system disruption = starvation], which I’m not convinced is the same thing. A definition of cyberwar that loosens causation – that, in other words, cannot demonstrate a direct, causal relationship between an intentional cyber-act and a violent outcome – blurs the line with cybercrime, and thereby makes the potential for war easier. Which implies…
Principle #3: Cyberwar should be attributable to cyberwarriors. Laws and conventions governing war require uniforms and markings. Military vehicles are marked as such, clearly distinguishable from, say, civil ships and aircraft. The more difficult it is to separate criminal acts from a legitimate use of force, the greater the opportunity for misattribution and retaliation…and the greater the temptation for states to engage in illegitimate uses of force.
This last point seems quaint – certainly, there’s a lag between laws and conventions defining war, and the technology used to wage it. But isn’t that the point? John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School has pointed out that the Chemical Weapons Convention offers a solid precedent for restraining a “cyber arms race,” a race which will take on velocity if we can’t get our definitions under control.
Minor addendum, part I: With reference to principle #2 – and Arquilla’s own belief in the potential for a cyber 9/11 – is it really sensible to develop terms around the scenario of an act that’s limited purely to information systems? It’s unconvincing. Such an act, even if possible to the description outlined above, doesn’t seem rational. It would likely leave most military forces intact, which means that the attacked state would preserve significant potential for a very real and damaging response. A more likely scenario seems one in which a “digital Pearl Harbor” is accompanied by an actual Pearl Harbor…in which case the digital side is just a secondary accompaniment to a very real act of war.
Minor addendum, part II: As Arquilla also points out, Russia (“ironically”) has been advocating an agreement to govern cyberwar for 13 years. This NY Times article from June highlights the differences between U.S. and Russian stances.
Three for Tuesday
Seen around the cyber-halls on a Tuesday afternoon:
1. Courtesy of Slashdot and Spiegel Online: SWIFT, which handles transfers between financial institutions, is moving its servers and database from the U.S. to Europe. The EU is likely to let the U.S. to continue to monitor SWIFT transactions for anti-terrorism purposes…at least for now. How likely would approval have been if this move had been made during the Bush years? Will a change of…well, tone on the part of the Obama Adminstration be enough to mollify opposition to activities that arguably encroach on European privacy measures?
2. Over at Wired’s Dual Perspectives, Kim Zetter has an article that sort of makes the right point…that we need much improved definition around terms like “cyber war” and “cyber attack”…but then muddles that point with language like this: “In a battle where the militarized zone exists solely in the ether(net) and where anyone can wield the cyber-equivalent of a 10-ton bomb, how do we fight, let alone find, the enemy?” To illustrate the point, there’s a reference to the infamous Homeland Security video from 2007 about the U.S. power grid, and a story from 1982 (!) about a logic bomb that literally detonated a Siberian pipeline. I’m not convinced that you get anywhere close to un-muddling terms like “cyber war” until we stop using military metaphors that don’t really mean much, viz. cyber-equivalent of a 10-ton bomb.
3. Courtesy of North Korean Economy Watch: somebody put KCNA on Twitter. Which means that Twitter might just be pure entertainment.
