The New Digital Age

by Jared Cohen

  Words and speeches against violent extremism will not be enough in the battle for young hearts and minds. Military force will not do the job, either. Governments have been largely successful at capturing and killing existing terrorists but less effective at stemming the flow of recruits. As General Stanley McChrystal, the former U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, told Der Spiegel in 2010, “What defeats terrorism is really two things. It’s rule of law and then it’s opportunity for people. So if you have governance that allows you to have rule of law, you have an environment in which it is difficult to pursue terrorism. And if you have an opportunity for people in life, which includes education and the chance to have a job, then you take away the biggest cause of terrorism. So really, the way to defeat terrorism is not military strikes, it’s going after the basic conditions.”

  McChrystal’s insight spotlights an opportunity for technology enthusiasts and companies alike, because what better way is there to improve a population’s quality of life than boosting its connectivity? The gains that communication technologies produce for communities—economic opportunity, entertainment, freedom of information, greater transparency and accountability—all contribute to the antiradicalization mission. Once a large segment of a population is online, it will be possible to mobilize the local virtual community to reject terrorism and demand accountability and action from its leaders. There will be more voices speaking out against extremism than for it, and while technology may extend the reach of fanatics, it will be impossible to preach one way of thinking without encountering some interference. All of the things that come with an active virtual sphere—more discussion, more points of view, more counternarratives—can introduce doubt and promote independent thinking among these young, malleable populations. Of course, all of this would fall on more receptive ears if connectivity led to job creation.

  The most potent antiradicalization strategy will focus on the new virtual space, providing young people with content-rich alternatives and distractions that keep them from pursuing extremism as a last resort. This effort should be large and involve stakeholders from every background—the public sector, private companies, partnerships between local actors and activists abroad. Mobile technology, particularly, will play the dominant role in this campaign, since the majority of people coming online will do so through their handsets. Phones are personalized and powerful platforms, status symbols that their users rely on and value deeply. Reaching disaffected youth through their mobile phones is the best possible goal we can have.

  Western companies and governments will not be the ones to develop the bulk of the new content. The best solutions will be hyper-local, designed and supported by people with intimate knowledge of the immediate environment. Building platforms that we merely hope alienated youth will like and use is the equivalent of dropping propaganda flyers from an airplane.

  Outsiders don’t have to develop the content; they just need to create the space. Wire up the city, give people basic tools and they’ll do most of the work themselves. A number of technology companies have developed start-up kits for people to build applications on top of their platforms; Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine are two examples, and there will be many others. Creating space for others to build the businesses, games, platforms and organizations they envision is a brilliant corporate maneuver, because it ensures that a company’s products are used (boosting brand loyalty, too) while the users actually build and operate what they want. Somalis will build apps that are effective antiradicalization tools to reach other Somalis; Pakistanis will do the same for other Pakistanis. There will be more opportunities for local people to build small businesses and create outlets for youth at the same time. The key is to simply enable people to adapt products in ways that fit their needs and don’t require complex technological expertise.

  Public-private partnerships with local activists and people of influence will drive this process. Companies should also look to partnering with local groups to develop content. Ideally, what emerges is a range of content, platforms and applications that speak to each community distinctly yet share technological or structural components enabling them to be mimicked in other places. If the causes of radicalization are similar everywhere, the remedies can be, too.

  Technology companies are uniquely positioned to lead this effort internationally. Many of the most prominent ones have all the values of a democratic society with none of the baggage of being a government—they can go where governments can’t, speak to people off the diplomatic radar and operate in the neutral, universal language of technology. Moreover, this is the industry that produces video games, social networks and mobile phones—it has perhaps the best understanding of how to distract young people of any sector, and kids are the very demographic being recruited by terror groups. The companies may not understand the nuances of radicalization or the differences between specific populations in key theaters like Yemen, Iraq and Somalia, but they do understand young people and the toys they like to play with. Only when we have their attention can we hope to win their hearts and minds.

  Moreover, due to technology companies’ involvement in security threats—their products are being used by terrorists—the public will eventually demand that they do more in the fight against extremism. This means not only improving their products and protecting users with strict policies regarding content and security, but also taking a public stand. Just as the capitulation of MasterCard and PayPal to political pressure in the WikiLeaks saga convinced many activists that the companies took sides, inaction on the part of technology companies will be considered indefensible to some. Fairly or otherwise, companies will be held responsible for destructive uses of their products. Companies will reveal their personalities and core values according to how they rise to meet these challenges. Empty words will not pacify an informed public.

  We can already see early steps in this direction, as some companies make clear statements in policy or procedure. At YouTube, there is the challenge of content volume. With more than four billion videos viewed daily (and sixty hours of video uploaded each minute), it is impossible for the company to screen that content for what is considered inappropriate material, like advocating terrorism. Instead YouTube relies on a process in which users flag content they consider inappropriate; the video in question goes to a YouTube team for review, and it is taken down if it violates company policies. Eventually, we will see the emergence of industry-wide standards. All digital platforms will forge a common policy with respect to dangerous extremist videos online, just as they have coalesced in establishing policies governing child pornography. There is a fine line between censorship and security, and we must create safeguards accordingly. The industry will work as a whole to develop software that more effectively identifies videos with terrorist content. Some in the industry may even go so far as employing speech-recognition software that registers strings of keywords, or facial-recognition software that identifies known terrorists.

  Terrorism, of course, will never disappear, and it will continue to have a destructive impact. But as the terrorists of the future are forced to live in both the physical and the virtual world, their model of secrecy and discretion will suffer. There will be more digital eyes watching, more recorded interactions, and, as careful as even the most sophisticated terrorists are, even they cannot completely hide online. If they are online, they can be found. And if they can be found, so can their entire network of helpers.

  In this chapter we have explored the darkest ways that individuals will seek to violently disrupt our future world, but given that conflict and war are as much a part of human history as society itself, how will states and political movements engage in these activities to achieve their aims? We’ll now explore this question by imagining how conflict, combat and intervention are affected in a world where almost everyone is online.

  1 Cyber attackers cover their tracks by routing data through intermediary computers between themselves and their victims. Such “proxy” computers�
��which could include hacked computers in homes or businesses around the globe—appear to victims and outsiders as the sources of the attack, and it can be quite challenging to trace through many intermediary layers back to the true sources of cyber attacks. Making matters worse, an attacker can launch a Tor router on the compromised host, spewing obfuscating traffic throughout the compromised network and masking the attacker’s intentional activities.

  2 This will still prove difficult to achieve, depending on the nature of the crime. Kevin Mitnick, who was an infamous computer hacker, was convicted, spent five years in prison and then, as part of his probation, was forbidden to use the Internet or a cell phone. He eventually fought the restriction through the legal system and won.

  3 At a minimum, platforms like WikiLeaks and hacker collectives that traffic in stolen classified material from governments enable or encourage espionage.

  4 Google, like many other companies, builds free tools that anyone can use. Because of this, the company is continuously working to understand how to mitigate the risks that hostile individuals and entities will use these tools to cause harm.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Future of Conflict, Combat and Intervention

  Never before have we been so aware of so many conflicts around the world. The accessibility of information about atrocities anywhere—the stories, the videos, the photos, the tweets—can often make it seem as though we live in an exceptionally violent time. But as the newspaper adage goes, “If it bleeds, it leads.” What has changed is not how many conflicts there are, but how visible they’ve become.

  If anything, we’re more peaceful than we’ve ever been, with the amount of violence in human societies declining precipitously in the past several centuries due to developments like strong states (which monopolize violence and institute the rule of law), commerce (other people become more valuable alive than dead) and expanded international networks (which demystify and humanize the Other). As the psychologist Steven Pinker explains in The Better Angels of Our Nature, his excellent and comprehensive survey of this trend, historical exogenous forces like these “favor our peaceable motives” like empathy, moral sense, reason and self-control, which “orient [us] away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism.” Once conscious of this shift, Pinker remarks, “The world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister.”

  Surely “connectivity” would belong in Pinker’s list of forces had he written his book fifty years hence, because the new level of visibility that perpetrators of violence face in a connected world and all that it portends will greatly weaken any incentives for violent action and alter the calculus of political will to commit crimes as well as stop them.

  Nevertheless, conflict, wars, violent border skirmishes and mass atrocities will remain a part of human society for generations to come even as they change form in accordance with the technological age. Here we explore the ways in which different elements of conflict—the buildup of discrimination and persecution, combat and intervention—will change in the coming decades in response to these new possibilities and penalties.

  Fewer

  Genocides, More

  Harassment

  The origins of violent conflicts are far too complex to have a single root cause. But one well-understood trigger that will change substantially in the new digital age is the systematic discrimination or persecution of minority groups, during which targeted communities become the victims of grave violence or themselves become perpetrators of retaliatory acts. We believe that, in the future, massacres on a genocidal scale will be harder to conduct, but discrimination will likely worsen and become more personal. Increased connectivity within societies will provide practitioners of discrimination, whether they are official groups or ones led by citizens, with entirely new ways to marginalize minorities and other disliked communities, whose own use of technology will make them easier to target.

  Governments that are used to repressing minorities in the physical world have a whole new set of options in the virtual world, and those that figure out how to combine their policies in both worlds will be that much more effective at repression. Should the government of a connected country wish to harass a particular minority community in the future, it will find a number of tactics immediately available. The most basic would be to simply erase content about that group from the country’s Internet. States with strong filtering systems will find this easy, since the ISPs could just be required to block all sites containing certain keywords, and to shut down sites with prohibited content. To scrub the lingering references to the group on sites like Facebook and YouTube, the state could adopt an approach similar to China’s policy of active censorship, where censors automatically shut down the connection whenever a prohibited word is sighted.

  The Chinese government might well target the Uighur minority in western China. Concentrated in the restive Xinjiang region, this mostly Muslim Turkic ethnic group has long seen tensions flare with the majority Han Chinese, and separatist movements in Xinjiang have been responsible for a series of failed uprisings in the past several years. Though small, the Uighur population has caused countless headaches in Beijing, and it’s no stretch of the imagination to think that the government could move from censoring Uighur-related episodes (like the 2009 Ürümqi riots) to eliminating all Uighur content online.

  States might view this kind of action as a political imperative, an effort to mitigate the internal threats to stability by simply erasing them. Information about the groups would remain available outside a country’s Internet space, of course, but internally it would vanish. This would be intended both to humiliate the group by negating its very existence and also to isolate it further from the rest of the population. The state could persecute the group with greater impunity, and in time, if the censorship was thorough enough, future generations of majority groups could grow up with barely any awareness of the minority group or the issues associated with it. Erasing content is a quiet maneuver, difficult to quantify and unlikely to set off alarm bells, because such efforts would have small tangible impact while remaining symbolically and psychologically disparaging to the groups most affected. And even if a government were to get “caught” somehow, and shown to be deliberately blocking minority-specific content, officials would probably justify their actions on security grounds or blame them on computer glitches or infrastructure failures.

  If a government wanted to go further than content control, and escalate its discriminatory policies to full-blown persecution online, it could find ways to limit a given group’s access to the Internet and its services. This might sound trivial in comparison with the physical harassment, random arrests, acts of violence, and economic and political strangulation that persecuted groups around the world experience today. But as connectivity spreads, Internet service and mobile devices offer vital outlets for individuals to transcend their current environment, connecting them with information, jobs, resources, entertainment and other people. Excluding oppressed populations from participating in the virtual world would be a very drastic and damaging policy, because in important ways they’d be left out and left behind, unable to tap into any of the opportunities for growth and prosperity that we see connectivity bringing elsewhere. As banking, salaries and payment transactions move increasingly onto online platforms, exclusion from the Internet will severely curtail people’s economic prospects. It would be far more difficult to access one’s money, to pay by credit card or get a loan.

  Already, the Romanian government deliberately excludes some 2.2 million ethnic Roma from the same opportunities as the rest of the population, a policy manifested in separate education systems, economic exclusion in the form of hiring discrimination and unequal access to health and medical benefits (not to mention a heavy social stigma). Current statistics on the Roma’s level of access to technology are hard to come by—many Roma fail to register themselves as such on government surveys for fear of persecution—but as we’ve made clear, con
nected Roma will find ways to improve their circumstances. The Roma might even consider pursuing virtual statehood of some kind in the future.

  But if the Romanian government decided to extend its policies toward the Roma into the online world, nearly all of those opportunities would evaporate. Technological exclusion could take many forms, depending on how much control the state has and how much pain it wants to cause. If it required all citizens to register their devices and IP addresses (many governments already require mobile devices to be registered) or maintained a “hidden people” registry, Romanian authorities using that data would find it easy to block the Roma’s access to news, outside information and platforms with economic or social value. These users would suddenly find themselves unable to reliably access their own personal data or their online banking services; they would confront error messages or seem to have egregiously slow connection speeds. Using its power over the country’s telecommunications infrastructure, the government could instigate dropped calls, jam phone signals in certain neighborhoods or occasionally short-circuit the Roma’s connections to the Internet. Perhaps the government, working with private-sector distributors, could engineer the sale of defective devices to Romany individuals (selling to them through compromised trusted intermediaries), distributing laptops and mobile phones riddled with bugs and back doors that would allow the state to input malicious code at a later date.