Black Code

* Book: Ron Deibert. Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace.

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Interview

Conducted by Spark CBC radio:

"The subtitle for your book is, “Inside the Battle for Cyberspace,” and you lay out different battlegrounds where this is going on. How would you characterize what that battle is?

We kind of take this communications ecosystem that’s all around us for granted. It surrounds us, it’s deeply embedded in everything we do. It seems like this wonderful liberating technology, which it is, in many cases. It’s phenomenal. But there are kind of dark clouds forming on the horizon. They come in multiple shapes and forms, which I try to describe in the book.

I think one of the biggest ones has to do with security. The fact that this domain is now being securitized, that was probably inevitable. When it was a minor network used by university researchers and geeks, it really didn’t matter. Now that it is part of everything, part of critical infrastructure, hospitals and so on, of course, securing it has become critical.

* What do you mean by securitized?

Securitized is actually a term that comes from political science, a term that describes the process of taking an area, whatever it is, drugs, environment, and describing it in military terms — the “war on drugs” and so on. We’re seeing a lot of that in cyberspace — cyberwarfare, cybersecurity.

People who have studied the processes of securitization notice that there are certain tendencies that go along with it. Secrecy is one. The predominance of military and intelligence agencies is another. Trying to govern a domain through hierarchy and closure and so on.

We see this going on in cyberspace. The big three-letter agencies that most people have never heard of are now actually taking command of cyberspace. To me, that’s paradoxical. In a world of so much seeming transparency, we’re delegating authority over — essentially our public sphere — to some of the world’s most secretive agencies. This is not a good recipe in the long run.

* One of the things that you explore is how governments are surveilling and censoring the Internet. How have you seen that play out in Syria?

Syria is a really interesting case. In addition to all the terrible things that are going on, they’re in the midst of a civil war and obviously war crimes, crimes against humanity happening. I think many people initially thought, a couple of years ago, that Syria would follow in step with the other Arab regimes, like Tunisia, Egypt. There would be a toppling of this dictatorship because of Twitter-enabled dissidents.

We at the Citizen Lab — I think primarily because of our research networks in the Middle East and North Africa — we had a different view on it. We were certainly more cautious. That was because we had seen the ways these governments that were quickly toppled in Egypt and Tunisia actually had capabilities that, if you re-ran history, it might have turned out differently. I think the clock ran out on them. But they had very advanced surveillance technologies equipped by Western firms that enabled them to infiltrate opposition groups and essentially monitor their computers.

We see this going on now in Syria. Dissidents, opposition — the Syrian opposition — is routinely targeted with malicious software, usually through a Skype link or a comment on YouTube that then takes over their computers and compromises their social networks. It’s hard to say, on balance, what impact that has had on the conflict, but it’s certainly put many people on the opposition side at great risk.

The other interesting thing about Syria is the Syrian Electronic Army. There is a group of pro-government electronic actors. They seem to be operating with the encouragement and support of the Syrian government, but they’re not quite connected to it. They’re not like a traditional army. They’ve been becoming more sophisticated over time.

At first, they were defacing websites that had no connection to Syria. Of course, just a few weeks ago, they commandeered the Twitter account of Associated Press and put this notice about a bombing, a hoax about a bombing in the White House. We saw the stock market drop 500 points. They’re getting much more sophisticated. That’s a really interesting phenomenon, this idea of pro-government electronic actors using offensive computer network attack capabilities to support autocratic regimes and infiltrating opposition groups abroad.

* You paint a picture of an Internet that’s gradually becoming more controlled by the government. Why is this so troubling to you?

I think there’s a kind of fitness problem when it comes to ideally what we want a global communications environment to look like and how governments tend to operate and the capabilities that they have. I think it’s inevitable that governments would get involved in the Internet.

The issue is that we don’t want a heavy hand. We don’t want them to impose controls that territorialize the Internet because ultimately, in my opinion anyway, if we are going to survive as a species — deal with all the problems that we have from environmental change to population, disease, whatever — we need a single communications environment through which we can share ideas and debate and so on.

With the Internet, we came very close to having that, but it is now being carved up. It’s being heavily monitored, and governments are asserting control. They’re changing the way private companies operate in cyberspace, in important ways.

That will end up essentially Balkanizing it, and I think that’s a recipe for disaster in the long run." (http://sparkcbc.tumblr.com/post/51811846388/black-code-inside-the-battle-for-cyberspace-q-a)