Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

In India, these concerns seem to be outweighed by the promise of the plan’s benefits, but their presence in the debate proves that even in a democracy, public apprehension over the impact of large biometric databases, and whether they’ll ultimately serve the citizens or the state, exists. So what happens when less democratic governments begin collecting biometric data in earnest? Many already have, beginning with passports.

States won’t be the only ones trying to acquire biometric data. Warlords, drug cartels and terrorist groups will seek to build or access biometric databases in order to track recruits, monitor potential victims and keep an eye on their own organizations. The same logic applies here as to dictators: If they have something to trade, they can get the technology.

Given the strategic value of these databases, states will need to prioritize protection of their citizens’ information just as they would safeguard weapons of mass destruction. Mexico is currently moving toward a biometric data system for its population in order to improve its law-enforcement functionality, better monitor its borders and identify criminals and drug-cartel leaders. But since the cartels have already infiltrated large swaths of the police and national institutions, there is a very real fear that somehow an unauthorized actor could gain access to the valuable biometric data of the Mexican population. Eventually, some illicit group will successfully steal or illegally acquire a biometric database from a government, and maybe only when that happens will states fully invest in high-level security measures to protect this data.

All societies will reach agreement on the need to keep biometric data out of the hands of certain groups, and most will try hard to keep individual citizens from gaining access as well. Regulation will, like regulation of other types of user data, vary by country. In the European Union, which already boasts a series of robust biometric databases, member states are required by law to ensure that no individual’s right to privacy is violated. States must get the full and informed consent of citizens before they can enter biometric information into the system, leaving citizens the option to revoke consent in the future without penalty. Member states are further required to hear complaints and see that victims are compensated. The United States will probably adopt similar laws due to shared privacy concerns, but in repressive countries, it’s likely that such databases will be controlled by the ministry of the interior, ensuring that they are primarily used as a tool for the police and security forces. Government officials in those regimes will also have access to facial-recognition software, databanks of citizens’ personal information and real-time surveillance methods through people’s technological devices. Secret police will often find a handset more valuable than a gun.

For all of the discussions about privacy and security, we rarely look at the two together and ask the question What makes people nervous about the Internet? From the world’s most repressive societies to those that are the most democratic, citizens are nervous about the unknowns, the dangers and crises that come with entangling their lives in a web of connected strangers. For those who are already connected, living in both the physical and the virtual worlds has become part of who we are and what we do. As we grow accustomed to this change, we also learn that the two worlds are not mutually exclusive, and what happens in one has consequences in the other.

What seem like defined debates today over security and privacy will broaden to questions of who controls and influences virtual identities and thus citizens themselves. Democracies will become more influenced by the wisdom of crowds (for better or for worse), poor autocracies will struggle to acquire the necessary resources to effectively extend control into the virtual world, and wealthier dictatorships will build modern police states that tighten their grip on citizens’ lives. These changes will spur new behaviors and progressive laws, but given the sophistication of the technologies involved, in most cases citizens stand to lose many of the protections they feel and rely upon today. How populations, private industry and states handle the forthcoming changes will be highly determined by their social norms, legal frameworks and particular national characteristics.

We will now turn to a discussion of how global connectivity will affect the way states operate, negotiate and wrestle with each other. Diplomacy has never been as interesting as it will be in the new digital age. States, which are constantly playing power politics in the international system, will find themselves having to retool their domestic and foreign policies in a world where their physical and virtual tactics are not always aligned.

1Most of these techniques fall under the umbrella of search-engine optimization (SEO) processes. To influence the ranking algorithm of search engines, the most common method is to seed positive content around the target (e.g., a person’s name), encourage links to it and frequently update it, so that the search-engine spiders are likely to identify the material as popular and new, which pushes down the older, less relevant content. Using prominent keywords and adding back-links (incoming links to a website) to popular sites can also influence the ranking. This is all legal and generally considered fair. There is an underside to SEO, however—“black-hat SEO”—where efforts to manipulate rankings include less legal or fair practices like sabotaging other content (by linking it to red-flag sites like child pornography), adding hidden text or cloaking (tricking the spiders so that they see one version of the site while the end user sees another).

2This dictum is commonly attributed to Stewart Brand, the founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, recorded at the first Hackers’ Conference, in 1984.

3While in the technical community the term “hacker” means a person who develops something quickly and with an air of spontaneity, we use it here in its colloquial meaning to imply unauthorized entry into systems.

4Among the tweets the Pakistani IT consultant Sohaib Athar sent the night of the bin Laden raid: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”

5“Predictive analytics” is a young field of study at the intersection of statistics, data-mining and computer modeling. At its core, it uses data to make useful predictions about the future. For one example, predictive analytics could use data on ridership fluctuations on the New York City subway to predict how many trains would be needed on a given day, accounting for seasonality, employment and the weather forecast.

6Interestingly, the VPPA statute came into play in a Texas lawsuit in 2008, when a woman filed a class-action suit against Blockbuster for sharing her rental and sales record with Facebook without her permission. The parties settled.

7In the United States, the “trespass to chattels” tort has in some cases already been applied to cyberspace.

8Wearable technology overlaps with the similar emergent industry of haptic technology, but the two are not synonymous. Haptics refers to technology that interacts with a user’s sense of touch, usually though pulses or the application of pressure. Wearable technologies often include many haptic elements but are not limited to them (like a jacket for cyclists that lights up in the evening); nor are all haptic technologies wearable.

CHAPTER 3

The

Future of States

What do we talk about when we talk about the Internet? Most people have only a vague sense of how the Internet works, and in most cases that’s fine. The majority of users don’t need to understand its internal architecture or how a hash function works in order to interface fluidly with the online world. But as we turn to a discussion about how state power affects, and is affected by, the Internet, some basic knowledge will help make clear a few of the more conceptually difficult scenarios that come into play.