# The Global Cyber Game: Achieving strategic resilience in the global knowledge society (part 6 of 10)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [143], part 6 of 10. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (PDF), 2013-05-08 (from the career record), https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Defence-tier report citing his cyber views; tangential to the build.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Global Cyber Game: Achieving strategic resilience in the global knowledge society (2013): Hardin Tibbs's 2013 report of the UK Defence Academy Cyber Inquiry for the Ministry of Defence, which...
  - Blind in the Panopticon: The decreasing marginal utility of access to information as an aspect of cyber policy (2012): Cyber policy essay: past a point, more surveillance data has negative value, because a state can collect... (suggested by machine)
  - Multipolar Realpolitik (2024): Essays arguing that a global truce among a few great powers, with treaties checked by AI, blockchains and... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in...
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: The Global Cyber Game (94%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: cyber (660 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Wired (35 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); Hardin Tibbs (8 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); DARPA (7 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); jobs (28 here; 85 sources in all, earliest dated 2003, 4 undated); communications (26 here; 81 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 5 undated); DNS (10 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Barlow (5 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); ICANN (3 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); realpolitik (5 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): peer-to-peer; Barlow; John Perry Barlow; economic zone; Forbes; Westphalia; real-world assets; DARPA; global commons
- Importance: core-text score 0.19 (1.00 is the top), number 371 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [243] [Multipolar Realpolitik (Omnibus draft) (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/243.md): close in content (cosine 0.92)
  - [851] [Global governance in the era of blockchain. (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/851.md): close in content (cosine 0.89)
- On the same works, just before: [400] [http://hub.coe.int/forum-mondial-de-la-democratie-5-11-oc... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/400.md); [399] [Council of Europe World Forum for Democracy... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/399.md); [395] Open Data Ireland 25 October inaugeral meeting (2012)
- On the same works, just after: [319] [A sleepless night trying to find words (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/319.md); [115] [Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/115.md); [286] [Ouishare on global democracy and the real sharing economy (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/286.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: The Global Cyber Game: Achieving strategic resilience in the global knowledge society, document, 2013-05-08, https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [143], https://guptaoption.com/texts/143.md.

## Passages, part 6 of 10
[p. 67 to 68](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=67) this kind of activism, untangling the resulting diplomatic issues could be complex, particularly in scenarios where physical world hard power retaliation was visited on activist networks by the states they were acting against. Lines become particularly confused when a given packet of information crosses jurisdictional and player-network boundaries several times. For example, data about human rights abuses may be passed from within a regime, through local activist networks, then through international activist networks, and finally to the global media. In a situation like this, actions 111 http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/09/201192712428972155.html accessed 30/03/13 The Global Cyber Game © 2013 62 www.da.mod.uk taken early on in the process may be illegal according to local law, but later publication may be clearly legitimate and legal by international standards. In such instances, the clash of values can be a devastating blow to a regime engaged in an internal struggle. As long as hard power measures taken by regimes to suppress revolutionary movements on their soil stay within their borders the nature of these conflicts will not change much, but as technical support from external third parties becomes an increasingly important part of such struggles, security issues will spread in a complex non- linear fashion. Civil society is a global force but so, potentially, is the counter pressure. Balancing the benefits and risks of civil society activism in international struggles may be a substantial foreign policy issue in future. Business and the Cyber Game The business perspective on the Cyber Game is that it is principally a means to make money. Despite the obvious potential, unfamiliarity and the difficulty posed by the information dilemma has made it hard for many businesses to make the transition from pre-existing to information-centric business models. From the heady days of the late 90s, and talk of a new economy based on entirely new principles, to the dotcom crash of the early 2000s, to the more recent convergence of hyperbole and pragmatism, it has taken a great deal of experimenting and theorizing to arrive at viable Internet-native business models and there is no sense that the transformation is complete. Though forewarned, business was unprepared for the advent of e-commerce in the late 90s, which was based not on mainframe computers but on the World Wide Web, a hyperlinked collection of interactive information resources riding on the Internet. By the mid-2000s the Web had evolved into the so-called Web 2.0, also known as the ‘Social Web,’ a second generation of web-based communities and services, such as social networking sites and wikis, which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration and sharing between users. The term Web 2.0 became popular following the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. According to O’Reilly, ‘Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.’ The next development was the ‘cloud’, the notion of the Internet as a platform for powerful distributed applications. The essence of cloud

[p. 68 to 69](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=68) conference in 2004. According to O’Reilly, ‘Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.’ The next development was the ‘cloud’, the notion of the Internet as a platform for powerful distributed applications. The essence of cloud computing was captured in a 2006 Wired Magazine headline: ‘The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you’ll ever use.’ In the article following the headline, George Gilder described why this was happening: ‘Back in 1993, in a midnight email to me from his office at Sun Microsystems, CTO Eric Schmidt envisioned the future: “When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network.”...In which direction would the profits from that transformation flow? “Not to the companies making the fastest processors The Global Cyber Game © 2013 63 www.da.mod.uk or best operating systems,” he [correctly] prophesied, “but to the companies with the best networks and the best search and sort algorithms.”’ 112 The potential of the cloud to deliver full scale applications was realized when Google introduced Gmail, quickly followed by Google Maps, web based applications with rich user interfaces and PC-equivalent interactivity. In a sense this was merely a recapitulation of the client-server model of computing from the 1970s, but with vastly more computers and far faster networks. The global community of commentators in the blogosphere struggled to interpret what these developments meant for business. Tim O’Reilly, a leading commentator, offered this interpretation: ‘Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an ‘architecture of participation,’ and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.’ 113 Many new companies exploited the new features offered by Web 2.0. These included Google (AdSense and Web-based applications), eBay (using reputation), Wikipedia (trusting readers as authors), Flickr and del.icio.us (using tagging instead of taxonomy), BitTorrent (radical decentralization), and Cloudmark (aggregating user decisions). The Web 2.0 approach is to allow the user to control their own data within a context set by applications that use the Web as a platform. Following from this is the idea that the individual’s primary interface with the Web becomes the personal profile, and ‘social software’ will allow the user to create social networks online and relate to the world and to Web-based applications and services through their profile. As large numbers of users are attracted to these services, the software is able to extract useful information from the aggregate behaviour and

[p. 69 to 70](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=69) the individual’s primary interface with the Web becomes the personal profile, and ‘social software’ will allow the user to create social networks online and relate to the world and to Web-based applications and services through their profile. As large numbers of users are attracted to these services, the software is able to extract useful information from the aggregate behaviour and choices of all those users. This information then becomes available to the individual user in a way that would not be possible if they, and all the other users, did not participate by registering, establishing their profile and entering the social network. The latest business development in the Cyber Game is the increasing value of data analytics or data mining and the related idea of ‘big data.’ 114 As the cost of bandwidth and storage drop, and mobile devices proliferate, vast amounts of information about everyone and everything are being generated and captured in real time. Everything that can be digitized will be digitized, and the digitized information will be available everywhere instantly, before, during and after the activities and events it is associated with. 112 George Gilder, ‘The Information Factories’ Wired vol.14, no.10 (October 2006) 113 http://radar.oreilly.com/2005/10/web-20-compact-definition.html accessed 18/02/13 114 http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_fronti er_for_innovation accessed 18/02/13 The Global Cyber Game © 2013 64 www.da.mod.uk This exponentially growing flood of data, hence ‘big data’, can be retained indefinitely in a form that can be mined and acted on, and is becoming increasingly valuable as a powerful way to find new business opportunities. The value will increase if this information can be distributed in common formats that allow it to be shared and paired. ‘Information wants to be social’ 115—it gains in value when it is made available and combined with other information, and when the result is presented in a form that allows action to be taken on it. A key concept here is ‘informationalizing’, which refers to the addition of dynamic information content, features and functions to a product or service. The resulting increase in value comes not from material changes but from new intangibles, such as choice, variety, responsiveness, intelligence and enhanced services. Often the profitability of the new features exceeds that of the original product or service. The more dynamic information capability a product has, the more it mobilizes information and the more it is likely to evolve beyond the usage patterns and scope of the original product or service. 116 One consequence of the flood of data is that business players are compiling substantial dossiers on individuals. The ability to deliver precisely targeted advertising is the major revenue stream of many, if not most, large dotcom companies. Programmes from Google or Facebook compile information from a wide variety of sources, enrich it with ‘clickstream’ resources from ‘Like’ buttons, searches, partner sites and more detailed psychographics and biographies. When the Obama campaign used these techniques to mobilize support during the US presidential race, big data began to translate into big political power. This points to a potential convergence of

[p. 70 to 71](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=70) from Google or Facebook compile information from a wide variety of sources, enrich it with ‘clickstream’ resources from ‘Like’ buttons, searches, partner sites and more detailed psychographics and biographies. When the Obama campaign used these techniques to mobilize support during the US presidential race, big data began to translate into big political power. This points to a potential convergence of business and state cyberpower resources that could have significant implications for civil liberties. The energy and effort business players are pouring into understanding the economic dimension of the Cyber Game is enabling them to build very considerable know-how in using digital information to create economic value. Although they are lagging on the cyber security front, they are definitely the leading player in creating direct value from the global information infrastructure. If governments are to have any hope of regulating this concentration of know-how, they have a long way to catch up. Criminal players and the Cyber Game The value created by business Cyber Game players is, of course, subject to rising costs imposed by a class of cyber players directly opposed to the public interest, the organized crime groups. They use a mirror-image of cyber-business methods to create sophisticated online sales platforms for stolen information and malware, and it is big ‘business’. 117 The selling price of a previously unknown vulnerability or remote zero-day exploit for the 115 http://www.socialsquare.dk/2012/06/03/information-wants-to-be-social/ accessed 14/02/13 116 Thomas Redman, Data Driven (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2008) 117 Chris Grier et al., ‘Manufacturing Compromise: The Emergence of Exploit-as-a-Service’ The Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), (October 2012) http://www.imchris.org/research/grier_ccs2012.pdf accessed 26/02/13 The Global Cyber Game © 2013 65 www.da.mod.uk Macintosh OS, for example, is reported to be $200,000. 118 And in a 2011 study, the cyber security firm Symantec estimated global cyber crime was running at $114 billion annually. 119 The existence of very large botnets under criminal control also gives criminal cyber players immense computing power. A botnet is formed when malware penetrates and links a large group of computers, allowing them to be remotely controlled to act in a coordinated fashion for malicious purposes, usually without the owners’ knowledge. Each compromised computer is called a bot or a ‘zombie’. Botnets can be used to send malware or spam, or to launch attacks. BredoLab, reported to be the largest botnet so far discovered and partially dismantled in 2010 by Dutch law enforcement, consisted of 30 million zombie computers, capable of sending 3.6 billion spam messages a day. Just as business often creates environmental pollution and leaves the government to pay for cleaning it up, so business is leaving much of the cost of cyber insecurity to others. Considering the paltry investment in countering cyber crime by the government, it might be wise to look to the main beneficiaries of cyber commerce to carry more of the costs of its cyber-security; instead a new industry is springing up to sell cyber security to government. Public perspectives on the Cyber Game

[p. 71 to 72](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=71) of the cost of cyber insecurity to others. Considering the paltry investment in countering cyber crime by the government, it might be wise to look to the main beneficiaries of cyber commerce to carry more of the costs of its cyber-security; instead a new industry is springing up to sell cyber security to government. Public perspectives on the Cyber Game As cyber players, the public range from passive bystanders to a few so-called ‘super- empowered individuals’ who are empowered by digital information technology. In general though, most people would be well-advised to pay more attention to what is happening on the Cyber Gameboard around them, or they will find they are the subjects of collateral damage. People know that business models based on amassing personal data are not entirely benign. Facebook users of all ages are frequently irritated by the cavalier way it changes privacy settings without warning, and the uncertainty about what is happening to their personal information. But the implicit deal with Facebook is that if you are intrepid enough to trust it with your personal data, it will sell your resulting ‘social graph’ in exchange for connecting you with your friends. If government and business begin to join forces in online profiling, so that, for example, Internet service providers’ traffic logs are merged with databases such as credit card transactions into a single integrated picture of a person’s life, at some point a ‘threshold of transparency’ will be crossed. Past this threshold, individuals will feel their lives represent an open book to the government and private enterprise. The threshold of transparency will vary from individual to individual, with responses ranging from a generic ‘Facebook is compiling data about me’ to a literal paranoia about being watched because, after all, it actually is true that mobile phones are evolving into more and more effective surveillance platforms. The threshold will quickly be approached if industry persuades government departments to amass big data on citizens without appropriate safeguards. When mandating large-scale databases, governments should be wary of using their powers to compel citizen compliance 118 From commentary submitted to the Inquiry by Smari McCarthy 119 http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=20110907_02 accessed 18/02/13 The Global Cyber Game © 2013 66 www.da.mod.uk with schemes that could put safety and privacy at risk. However attractive the economic opportunities may look, government’s task is also to protect citizens, not merely to facilitate the plans of private enterprise. This appears to explain why, for example, the latest plans to introduce an integrated electronic health record in the UK 120 have drawn strong objections from both computer experts and health professionals. 121 If the benefits of big data are to be realised in the area of public services provision, governments must be able to distinguish between well-designed and poorly thought-out schemes, which means freedom from conflict of interest and a balance of know-how between public sector and private sector cyber players in the economic power level of the Cyber Gameboard. On these issues, EU and US data protection philosophies diverge

[p. 72 to 73](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=72) be realised in the area of public services provision, governments must be able to distinguish between well-designed and poorly thought-out schemes, which means freedom from conflict of interest and a balance of know-how between public sector and private sector cyber players in the economic power level of the Cyber Gameboard. On these issues, EU and US data protection philosophies diverge sharply. In the EU, the nascent ‘right to be forgotten’ suggests that users have an inherent right to ask institutions and companies to purge their records, based on the principle that the individual owns the data companies hold about them. In the US, information about individuals is regarded as the property of the organization that obtained it, and there is no parallel right. This may have substantial long-term implications for the interoperability of EU and US ventures, perhaps resulting in delayed treaty harmonization, as has been the case for copyright and patent differences between EU and US approaches. Another public concern is the impact of the Cyber Game on employment. Advanced information-processing algorithms plus the continued march of Moore’s Law may be about to displace many old jobs, 122 but the view of business economists is that the useful output of the algorithms can be expected to replace the old jobs with new ones. Where and what these jobs will be is glossed over, as no one knows. But if algorithms have now reached the level of performance where they disproportionately erode professional jobs, then the hollowing out of the middle class will accelerate. The question for government cyber players is whether this itself is a cyber security risk. Kim Dotcom versus the US government The information dilemma described earlier has the potential to be a source of conflict, involving the interests of civil society, business and state in complex combinations that have not been well understood to date. This is illustrated by the case of Kim Dotcom, formerly Kim Schmitz, a German national living in New Zealand, whose company Megaupload was taken down on 20th January 2012 in a law enforcement operation initiated by the US government. Megaupload.com was a free online storage space, a warehouse in the cloud with 50 million users a day at its peak and annual revenues of $175m. The US Department of Justice maintained that the site was used for illegal file sharing, particularly of videos and music, and had Dotcom arrested for copyright infringement among other charges. 123 120 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9804402/Privacy-fears-as-Jeremy-Hunt-orders-health-records- to-be-shared-throughout-NHS.html accessed 18/02/13 121 http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2013/01/16/privacy-considered-harmful/ accessed 18/02/13 122 http://singularityhub.com/2012/11/12/1-million-robots-to-replace-1-million-human-jobs-at-foxconn- first-robots-have-arrived/ accessed 30/03/13 123 Charles Graeber, ‘Kim Dotcom’ Wired vol.20, no.11 (November 2012), 158-161 & 192-200. The Global Cyber Game © 2013 67 www.da.mod.uk Businesses selling content that either is or can be digitized, such as the music industry and newspapers, are strongly affected by the information dilemma. The information ‘wants to be free’ but the content industry wants it to be expensive. The problem is that accessing this content for free by computer has become easier than purchasing and consuming it in its

[p. 73 to 74](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=73) Businesses selling content that either is or can be digitized, such as the music industry and newspapers, are strongly affected by the information dilemma. The information ‘wants to be free’ but the content industry wants it to be expensive. The problem is that accessing this content for free by computer has become easier than purchasing and consuming it in its traditional form. One response to this dilemma is to accept that content will become free and devise alternative business models. As Internet commentator Chris Anderson put it in his blog, ‘Unlike simply selling what we make, free requires creative thinking about how to make money around what we make.’ 124 Commercial music content first became free thanks to innovations such as Napster, the free music file sharing service that operated between 1999 and 2001, and other peer-to-peer file sharing software. The underlying idea seems to have been that if online content is going to become free anyway, this tendency might as well be actively harnessed to make the information free and accessible for use and re-use by everyone, since this would be a social good. If information content is free, commercial opportunities for content do not disappear. Instead they transform. Although some musicians, such as Radiohead, found Napster useful as a form of promotion, the established music business fought it vigorously in the courts, leading to its bankruptcy and closure in 2002. Meanwhile, Apple made use of exactly the same information technology principles to reinvent the music business legally. Incumbent content firms faced by the information dilemma can either choose to fight back or innovate. Taking legal action is not exactly good publicity, and consumers understandably prefer the convenience of digital access. Innovation is likely to involve a fusion of new business model and new technology, as Apple demonstrated with iTunes and the iPod, which made paying for digital content as easy as free access, and integrated it into a very desirable consumption device. Interestingly, despite grumbling from the music industry, both music companies and artists make more money from each iTunes sale than they do from a retail store music CD sale. 125 By mid-2012 in the US, Apple had 64 percent of the digital music market and 29 percent of all retail music sales. 126 When newspapers first moved online they voluntarily provided free access which, along with a loss of advertising to the web, gradually undermined their traditional business. Towards the end of his life, Steve Jobs was instrumental in persuading The New York Times to charge for subscriptions on the iPad, reportedly berating them for having given away the paper free online for too long 127. Jobs has been vindicated once again, as The New York Times is now one 124 http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/11/free-is-more-co.html accessed 14/02/13 125 http://www.cultofmac.com/38097/infographic-most-artists-earn-more-revenue-through-itunes-than- at-retail/ accessed 14/02/13 126 https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/itunes-continues-to-dominate-music- retailing-but-nearly-60-percent-of-itunes-music-buyers-also-use- pandora/!ut/p/c5/04_SB8K8xLLM9MSSzPy8xBz9CP0os3g3b1NTS98QY0MDbydTA08vSzcnV38LQ0 dTc_1I_ShznPI-ZvoF2YGKAMP77Ro!/ accessed 14/02/13 127 Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) The Global Cyber Game © 2013 68 www.da.mod.uk of the most successful online newspapers, with rapidly rising subscription sales

[p. 73 to 76](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=73) Jobs has been vindicated once again, as The New York Times is now one 124 http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/11/free-is-more-co.html accessed 14/02/13 125 http://www.cultofmac.com/38097/infographic-most-artists-earn-more-revenue-through-itunes-than- at-retail/ accessed 14/02/13 126 https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/itunes-continues-to-dominate-music- retailing-but-nearly-60-percent-of-itunes-music-buyers-also-use- pandora/!ut/p/c5/04_SB8K8xLLM9MSSzPy8xBz9CP0os3g3b1NTS98QY0MDbydTA08vSzcnV38LQ0 dTc_1I_ShznPI-ZvoF2YGKAMP77Ro!/ accessed 14/02/13 127 Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) The Global Cyber Game © 2013 68 www.da.mod.uk of the most successful online newspapers, with rapidly rising subscription sales estimated to be $91m and 12 percent of all subscription sales this year. 128 Although companies themselves may be reluctant to take legal action, the US government does seem willing to defend legacy industries, allegedly due to high level lobbying. 129 The heavy-handed takedown action against Kim Dotcom in New Zealand (which may yet prove legally and reputationally problematic for the US government) and the US federal prosecution of Internet innovator Aaron Swartz are cases in point. This had a tragic outcome in the case of Swartz, who committed suicide, 130 but in the case of Dotcom it has simply triggered a new and more resistant round of evolution that further intensifies the information dilemma. He openly describes the goal of his new online business, Mega, 131 in these terms: ‘...within the next five years, I want to encrypt half of the Internet. Just reestablish a balance between a person—an individual—and the state. Because right now, we are living very close to this vision of George Orwell and I think it’s not the right way. It’s the wrong path that the government is on, thinking that they can spy on everybody’. 132 128 http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/2012-12-20-the-new-york-times-paywall-is-working-better-than- anyone-had-guessed/ accessed 14/02/13 129 http://rt.com/usa/news/kim-dotcom-interview-mega-673/ accessed 14/02/13 130 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/05/aaron-swartz-memorial-darrell-issa_n_2619872.html accessed 14/02/13 131 https://mega.co.nz/#privacycompany accessed 14/02/13 132 http://rt.com/usa/news/kim-dotcom-interview-mega-673/ accessed 14/02/13 The Global Cyber Game © 2013 69 www.da.mod.uk Dotcom is playing the Cyber Game at two levels, the economic and the social power level. Enabling people to share information is a social power play that gives him a high degree of cyber legitimacy, even though the means of providing the service is a commercial company. The US government is seen to have lower cyber legitimacy because it is using hard power to act against a social power resource. In this round of Cyber Game play Dotcom ‘wins’ and the US government ‘loses’. Seen in terms of the Cyber Gameboard, this US Cyber Game play makes little strategic sense, particularly as there is a distinct risk it may lose in the courts against Kim Dotcom. If the US government is going to ally itself with US commercial Cyber Game players, it would do better to choose ones like Apple, which has very successfully managed to resolve the information dilemma for digital content and as a result has high cyber legitimacy. The Global Cyber Game © 2013 70 www.da.mod.uk Scenarios for the future of the Cyber Game The Cyber Gameboard is not a static arena of interaction. The gameplay it supports is of course highly dynamic, but over longer time periods the gameboard itself as well as the play on it will also be subject to deep crosscutting currents

[p. 75 to 76](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=75) cyber legitimacy. The Global Cyber Game © 2013 70 www.da.mod.uk Scenarios for the future of the Cyber Game The Cyber Gameboard is not a static arena of interaction. The gameplay it supports is of course highly dynamic, but over longer time periods the gameboard itself as well as the play on it will also be subject to deep crosscutting currents of change and development. These are important for strategy as they will tend to shape and condition the game as time goes on, and influence strategic aims. A number of change drivers have already been discussed, mainly related to the consequences of new information dynamics. They are central to the future of the Cyber Game, but are not of course the only future-shaping factors at work. This section briefly discusses four additional potentials for change that are not a direct function of information dynamics. These include the redesign of Internet technology, the changing nature of future conflict and the future of the state. Overarching all these is the possibility that the entire global system may be on the threshold of discontinuous change, either a general collapse or a jump to a new pattern of organization. In addition, since this whole system outcome is at least partly related to continued information abundance, the way the Cyber Game is played could affect or even determine the overall fate of the global system. The various change drivers are mainly described in terms of existing trends projected forwards. The future is not bound to follow existing trends, though it often does. But even when technology-driven trends consistently point to a more promising future, events may derail expected progress and these possible alternative outcomes can be captured as contrasting scenarios. At the end of this section, therefore, alternative future paths for the Cyber Game and the wider world context are framed in terms of scenarios. Future Internet redesign A good deal of the current concerns around cyber security are the result of the near-absence of security features in the original design of the Internet. It was originally built to facilitate communication in the closed communities of the military and academia, where people knew each other and could be trusted. In the 1970s, when the Internet was being developed, the encryption capability that could have made the Internet secure was still classified, and was only declassified in 1997 by President Clinton, long after the Internet’s intrinsically insecure design had become entrenched. Public access to encryption allowed Internet commerce to explode, as Clinton intended, but it could only patch over the underlying problems. Several efforts are now underway to address this problem at a fundamental level. The US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a number of such efforts, some involving the original developers of the Internet, to redesign it from the ground up. The goal of DARPA’s Clean Slate Design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts (CRASH) project is to design ‘new computer systems that are highly resistant to cyber-attack, can adapt after a

[p. 76 to 77](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=76) US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a number of such efforts, some involving the original developers of the Internet, to redesign it from the ground up. The goal of DARPA’s Clean Slate Design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts (CRASH) project is to design ‘new computer systems that are highly resistant to cyber-attack, can adapt after a successful attack to continue rendering useful services, learn from previous attacks how to guard against and cope with future attacks, and can repair themselves after The Global Cyber Game © 2013 71 www.da.mod.uk attacks have succeeded.’ 133 Peter Neumann, an 80-year old computer scientist at SRI International, is leading the CRASH effort and another, Mission-Oriented Resilient Clouds (MRC). The idea is to rethink everything from the silicon wafers to the applications, with potential solutions ranging from applications that continually change to elude attackers, to tagged architecture, in which each component of an application is encrypted to ensure its integrity. 134 In the same vein, Robert Kahn, the other co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, has proposed a Digital Object (DO) architecture which would identify all information flowing across the Internet by packaging it into ‘digital objects’ which allow easy identification of the type of data they contain, but not the actual data. Digital objects would have unique and persistent identifiers, which would specify such things as the nature and function of the data, how it should be handled and who should have access to it. One advantage of this proposal is that it could be incorporated into the existing Internet. 135 There are numerous Internet redesign initiatives, including the US National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Future Internet Architecture Project (FIA), its predecessor Future Internet Design (FIND), and the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI); the Named Data Networking (NDN) project of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the European Union’s Future Internet Assembly (FIA) collaboration which combines 150 Internet research sub-projects; Japan’s New Generation Network (NWGN) project, various projects sponsored by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology; 136 and The Republic of Korea’s Future Internet Project, among others. The breadth of this basic research means that over time it is almost bound to lead to fundamental improvements in Internet security. This means that much of the cyber security problem that exists now may well be transient and, within 10 to 15 years, be just a bad memory. While it lasts, however, it is presenting serious problems which, if not handled skilfully, could leave a damaging aftermath. From a national security perspective there are clear motives for wanting a more secure information infrastructure. One is the sheer uncertainty of knowing if critical information systems are compromised, particularly if pre-positioned malware is not used unless a real- world conflict erupts. Most military equipment now relies on on-board computers and network connections. At the moment of operational use, continuing cyberspace insecurity may mean that equipment does not function as and when expected. This will add enormously to the fog and friction of any

[p. 77 to 78](https://files.howtolivewiki.com/cyber/20130508-Cyber_report_final_U.pdf#page=77) critical information systems are compromised, particularly if pre-positioned malware is not used unless a real- world conflict erupts. Most military equipment now relies on on-board computers and network connections. At the moment of operational use, continuing cyberspace insecurity may mean that equipment does not function as and when expected. This will add enormously to the fog and friction of any incident, and may lead to unintended escalation in 133 http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/Clean- slate_design_of_Resilient_Adaptive_Secure_Hosts_(CRASH).aspx accessed 18/02/13 134 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/science/rethinking-the-computer-at-80.html?pagewanted=all accessed 18/02/13 135 Robert E Kahn, ‘The Role of Architecture in Internet Defense’, Chapter XII, America’s Cyber Future, Volume II, Center for a New American Security, 2011 http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_Cyber_Volume%20II_2.pdf accessed 14/02/13 136 Jianli Pan et al.,’A Survey of the Research on Future Internet Architectures’, IEEE Communications Magazine vol.49, no.7 (July 2011) http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/papers/ftp/internet.pdf accessed 14/02/13 The Global Cyber Game © 2013 72 www.da.mod.uk a panicked effort to get something, or anything, to work. This could well overcome any strategic prudence that might otherwise be operating. There are also some motives for resisting a fundamentally more secure Internet, mostly relating to intelligence operations. Whether an assurance that key equipment will work outweighs the loss of convenient surveillance is a question that defence organizations will need to address, though when the wider economic advantages are included in the calculus the advantages of secure information look persuasive. Some would argue that this is a non- issue as technological development is always an endless game of technical leapfrog, which would include the race between encryption and decryption. Nevertheless, individual technologies do mature and stabilize, locking in 137 around the outcomes of exactly this type of decision. If the Internet and the information infrastructure in general do become substantially secure, and at the same time are architected to allow access for intelligence agencies, this does raise important ethical issues related to the right to privacy. Since, at this point, a secure Internet would almost certainly lock in for the long run, it is vital that the civil liberties and state accountability issues are addressed and built in before redesign is taken over by a ‘just because we can’ mentality. The wildcard in this is the future of encryption; either encryption remains effective by always being a step ahead of all but the best-resourced players (the NSAs and GCHQs of the world) or conceivably some combination of Moore’s Law and say quantum computing might tip the balance decisively in favour of either unbreakable ciphers or the cracking of every cipher. Either case would have severe consequences and, for example, the latter would be a disaster for all online economic transactions. If it came at a point when essentially all personal communication was online, it could transform social dynamics, though if it happened to the generation who have grown up with Facebook, perhaps they would be well-prepared for this outcome! Nevertheless, at least in terms of the prospect for quantum computing tipping cryptography into a terminal condition, this currently appears unlikely. 138 In short, the intrinsic security weakness of existing information architectures cannot be

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/143-7.md (part 7 of 10).
End of [143] The Global Cyber Game: Achieving strategic resilience in the global knowledge society, part 6 of 10. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.