World War 3.0 — the Fight over Cyberspace

The post World War 3.0 — the Fight over Cyberspace appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

Russian interference in the US presidential election is barely the tip of the cyberwarfare iceberg. American cyber-sabotage of North Korean missiles, North Korea’s attacks on Sony Corporation, Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear program — these are all indications that the breadth and depth of cyber threats are far greater than we realize.

Alexander Klimburg, program director of the Hague Center for Strategic Studies and a former fellow of the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School, talks to WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman about the mounting competition among nations to dominate cyberspace.

Klimburg says that while governments themselves engage in — and are victims of — hacking and other forms of cyberwarfare, they also use such actions to justify their reach for more state control of the Internet. The US, China and Russia may pursue different objectives in their cyber operations, but they seem to agree on one goal: weaponizing information technology in the service of national interest.

Klimburg explains why defenses against hacking have proved so inadequate, the importance of maintaining bottom-up as opposed to top-down, control of the Internet and why we should look at the world’s financial system as a model for how to exercise such control.

In his book, THE DARKENING WEB: The War for Cyberspace, Klimburg reminds us that unless we resist attempts by national governments to take it over, the Internet, rather than bringing us together, may become a dark place that changes the world for the worse.

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Full Text Transcript: 

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Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman. Companies being hacked, nations and democracies being hacked, privacy under siege. The internet was supposed to change the world, create more freedom, and break down traditional barriers between nations and people. The irony is that it may be having the opposite effect as individuals, nations, and corporations seek to protect themselves and exploit the internet for greater profit. We could easily lose the very things it created. After all, with all due respects to Amazon, it was meant for more than just shopping. 

So where are we in this battle to protect the internet and what are the real dangers that we face? We’re going to talk about this today with my guest Alexander Klimburg. He’s the program director at The Hague Center for Strategic Studies, he’s a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and an associate and former fellow at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. He’s been an advisor to a number of governments and international organizations on cybersecurity strategy and internet governance and it is my pleasure to welcome Alexander Klimburg here to talk about the war for cyberspace. Alexander Klimburg, thanks so much for joining us.

Alexander Klimburg: Thanks for having me. 

Jeff Schechtman: As we look out today at the battles, the challenges that the internet faces, talk a little bit about what you see as the thing that we need to most focus on right now.

Alexander Klimburg: My main concern is that we don’t absolutely appreciate the internet that we have today and that it is actually a great invention, maybe on the level of the invention of the wheel, that has basically empowered our societies in new ways, given us new freedoms and new productivity. But that is only possible if the internet, effectively, remains free, free from the control of special interest. The internet is effectively managed by a galaxy of different actors, by civil society, the private sector, and government. 

And government is, by far, the least important actor. It can blow things up, it can also spy on things, so it can’t really build stuff in cyberspace. But they do want to get involved in this debate and they want to get involved in it strongly. Most importantly, governments outside of the US and the western block of like-minded democracies think that the internet should be run by states rather than as it is currently, which is by this galaxy of different actors with civil society in the lead. They want states to be the final decider on information in the internet, and we have to understand what that means. The final decider of information would mean the final word on everything regarding our lives, from the way we educate our children, to the media we consume, to the way we vote. 

So, we have to be aware that the internet that we have right now, which is effectively free internet that just facilitates our daily lives and doesn’t try to direct in a specific direction, could be changed. It’s not something that is likely to happen, but it’s possible to happen and since we were concerned with nuclear holocaust for decades on end, I think it’s also valid to be concerned of the internet becoming a much darker place as well.

Jeff Schechtman: There’s also an irony in all of this that’s a little like the fireman who’s also an arsonist. The idea that it is these governments, the US government, the Russian government, the Chinese government, that are creating such havoc within the framework of the internet, that it also becomes the reason why they want to do things to limit its freedom.

Alexander Klimburg: Absolutely. I think the example of the fireman and the arsonist is a very good one. Effectively, I am concerned that we sometimes look at cyber attacks in the West as being only technical while in the East, and actually also about hackers, cyber attacks are usually viewed as being primarily a human issue.     

Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from cyber ghost (Alejandro Juárez / Flickr – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

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