The New Digital Age

by Jared Cohen

  When not engaged in marketing wars, groups in conflict will attack whatever online entities they deem valuable to the other side. This means targeting the websites, platforms and communications infrastructure that have some strategic or symbolic importance with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, sophisticated viruses and all other types of cyber warfare. Online attacks will become an integral part of the tactical strategy for groups in conflict, from the lowest intensity fight to full-fledged warfare. Attacking or incapacitating a rival group’s communications network will not only interfere with its digital marketing abilities but will also affect its access to resources, information and its support base. Once a network or database has been successfully compromised, the infiltrating group can use the information they gathered to stay informed, spread misinformation, launch preemptive attacks and even track high-value targets (if, for example, a group found the mobile number for regime officials and had monitoring software that revealed their locations).

  Virtual attacks will happen independently and in retaliation. In a civil war, for example, if one side loses territory to the other, it might retaliate by bringing down its rival’s propaganda websites so as to limit its ability to brag about the victory—not an equivalent gain, of course, but damaging nonetheless. This is the virtual-world version of bombing the ministry of information, often one of the first targets in a physical-world conflict. A repressive government will be able to locate and disable the online financial portals that revolutionaries in the country are using to receive funds from supporters in the diaspora. Hackers sympathetic to one side or the other will take it upon themselves to dismantle whatever they can reach: YouTube channels run by their adversaries, databases relevant to the other side. When NATO began its military operations in Serbia in 1999, pro-Serbian hackers targeted public websites for both NATO and the U.S. Defense Department, with some success. (NATO’s public-affairs website for Kosovo was “virtually inoperable” for days as a result of the attacks, which also seriously clogged the organization’s e-mail server.)

  In the coming decades, we’ll see the world’s first “smart” rebel movement. Certainly, they’ll need guns and manpower to challenge the government, but rebels will be armed with technologies and priorities that dictate a new approach. Before even announcing their campaign, they could target the government’s communications network, knowing it constitutes the real (if not official) backbone of the state’s defense. They might covertly reach out to sympathetic governments to acquire the necessary technical components—worms, viruses, biometric information—to disable it, from within or without. A digital strike against the communications infrastructure would catch the government off guard, and as long as the rebels didn’t “sign” their attack, the government would be left wondering where it came from and who was behind it. The rebels might leave false clues as to the origin, perhaps pointing to one of the state’s external enemies, to confuse things further. As the state worked to get itself back online, the rebels might strike again, this time infiltrating the government’s Internet and “spoofing” identities (tricking the network into believing the infiltrators are legitimate users) to further disorient and disrupt the network processes. (If the rebels gained access to an important biometric database, they could steal the identities of government officials and impersonate them online, making false statements or suspicious purchases.) Finally, the rebels could target something tangible, like the country’s power grids, the manipulation of which would generate public outcry and blame, incorrectly aimed at the government. Thus the smart rebel movement could, with three digital strikes and no shots fired, find itself uniquely poised to mobilize the masses against a government that wasn’t even aware of a domestic rebellion. At this point, the rebels could begin their military assault and open a second, physical front.

  Conflicts in the future will also be influenced by two distinct and largely positive trends that stem from connectivity: first, the wisdom of the online crowd, and second, the permanence of data as evidence, which we alluded to earlier as making it harder for perpetrators of violence to deny or minimize their crimes.

  Collective wisdom on the Internet is a controversial subject. Many decry the negative extremes of online collaboration, such as the aggressive mediocrity of the “hive mind” (the collective consensus of groups of online users) and the viciousness of anonymity-fueled pack behavior on forums, social networks and other online channels. Others champion the level of accuracy and reliability of crowd-sourced information platforms like Wikipedia. Whatever your view, there are potential gains that collective wisdom can bring to future conflict.

  With a more level playing field for information in a conflict, a greater number of citizens can participate in shaping the narratives that emerge. Widespread mobile-phone usage will ensure that more people know what’s going on inside a country than did in earlier times, and Internet connectivity extends that sphere of engagement to a broad range of outside actors. On balance, there are always more people on the side of good than on the side of the aggressors. With an engaged population, there is greater potential for citizen mobilization against injustice or propaganda: If enough people are angry with what they see, they’ll have channels through which they can make their voices heard, and can act individually or collectively—even if, as we saw in Singapore, the anger is over the cooking of curry.

  The challenges of governing the Internet also allow for the danger of online vigilantism, as the story of China’s “human-flesh search engines” (renrou sousuo yinqing) shows. According to Tom Downey’s revealing March 2010 article in The New York Times Magazine, some years ago a disturbing trend emerged in China’s online space, where volumes of Internet users would locate, track down and harass individuals who had earned their collective wrath. (There is no central platform for this work, nor is the trend limited to China, but the phenomenon is most widely known and understood there, thanks to a series of high-profile examples.) In 2006, a gruesome video circulated on Chinese Internet forums depicting a woman stomping a kitten to death with her high-heeled shoes, leading to a countrywide search for the stomper. Through diligent crowd-sourced detective work, the perpetrator was soon tracked to a small town in northeastern China, and after her name, phone number and employer were made public, she fled, as did her cameraman. It’s not just computers that can find needles in haystacks, apparently; locating this woman among more than one billion Chinese—through only the clues in the video—took just six days.

  This kind of mob behavior can veer into unpredictable chaos, but that does not mean attempts to harness its collective power for good should be abandoned. Imagine if the end goal of the Chinese users was not to harass the kitten-stomper but to bring her to justice through official channels. In a conflict scenario, where institutions have broken down or are not trusted by the population, crowd-sourced energy will help to produce more comprehensive and accurate information, help track down wanted criminals and create demand for accountability even in the most difficult circumstances.

  But the importance and utility of crowd-sourced justice pales in comparison to the other modern development: data permanence. The exposure of atrocities in real time and in front of a global audience is vital, as is permanently storing it and making it searchable for everyone who wants to refer to it (for prosecutions, legislation or later study). Governments and other aggressors may have the military advantage with guns, tanks and planes, but they’ll be fighting an uphill battle against the information trail they leave behind. If a government attempts to block citizen communications, it may be able to stifle some of the evidence flowing through and out of the country, but the flow will continue. More important, the presence of this evidence, even if disputed at the time, will affect how the conflict is handled, resolved and considered well into the future.

  Accountability, or the threat of it, is a powerful idea; that’s why people try to destroy evidence. In the absence of hard data, conflicting narratives can impede justice and closure, and this appl
ies to citizens and states alike. In January 2012, France and Turkey became embroiled in a diplomatic row when the French Senate passed a bill (struck down one month later by the French Constitutional Council) that made it illegal to deny that the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 was genocide. The Turkish government, which rejects the term “genocide” and claims that far fewer than 1.5 million Armenians were killed, called the bill “racist and discriminatory” and said judgment of the killings should be left to historians. With the technological devices, platforms and databases we have today, it will be much more difficult for governments in the future to argue over claims like these, not just because of permanent evidence but because everyone else will have access to the same source material.

  In the future, tools like biometric data matching, SIM-card tracking and easy-to-use content-generating platforms will facilitate a level of accountability never before seen. A witness to a crime will be able to use his phone to capture what he sees and identify the perpetrator and victim with facial-recognition software almost instantly, without having to be directly in harm’s way. Information about crimes or brutality in digital form will be automatically uploaded to the cloud (thus no data loss if the witness’s phone is confiscated) and perhaps sent to an international monitoring or judicial body. An international court could then investigate, and depending on what it found, begin a public virtual trial and broadcast the proceedings back into the country where the perpetrator was roaming free. The risk of public shame and criminal charges might not deter leaders, but it would be enough to make some foot soldiers think twice before engaging in more violent activities. Professionally verified evidence would be available at The Hague’s website before the trial, and witnesses would be able to testify virtually and in safety.

  Of course, the wheels of justice turn slowly, particularly in the labyrinthine environment of international law. While a system of data responsiveness develops, the intermediate gains will be the storage of verifiable evidence, and better law enforcement will result. An open-source app, created by the International Criminal Court or some other body, could feature the world’s most wanted criminals broken down by country. Just as the Chinese human-flesh search engines can pinpoint an individual’s location and contact details, the same capability can be turned toward hunting down criminals. (Remember: People will have powerful phones in even the most remote places.) Using the same platform, concerned citizens around the world could contribute financially toward a reward as an incentive for making an arrest. Then, instead of facing mob justice, the criminal would be taken into custody by police and put on trial.

  The collective power of the online world will serve as a tremendous deterrent to potential perpetrators of brutality, corrupt practices and even crimes against humanity. To be sure, there will always be truly malevolent types for whom deterrence will not work, but for merely dishonorable individuals, the potential costs of bad behavior in a digital age will become only greater. Beyond the heightened risks of accountability and the increased liklihood of a crime being documented and preserved in perpetuity, whistle-blowers will use technology to reach the widest possible audience. Defectors will have a far greater incentive to avoid accusations of complicity in these documented crimes as well. Perhaps a digital witness-protection program will be built to provide informants with new virtual identities (like the ones sold on the black market mentioned earlier) to offer further incentives for their participation.

  Permanent digital evidence will also help shape transitional justice after a conflict has ended. Truth-and-reconciliation committees in the future will feature a trove of digital records, satellite surveillance, amateur videos and photos, autopsy reports and testimonials. (We’ll explore this topic shortly.) Again, the fear of being held accountable will be a sufficient deterrent for some would-be aggressors; at the very least they might dial back the level of violence.

  Beyond documenting atrocities, cloud storage will make data permanence relevant and important to people in conflict. Personal data not in the physical world will be safer, as it will be unreachable. Sometimes the outbreak of violence catches everyone by surprise. But in instances where the security situation is visibly declining, individuals will anticipate and prepare for the possibility of fleeing or being displaced. Individuals will also be able to sustain their claims to their homes, property and businesses even in exile or as refugees by capturing visual evidence and using tools like Google Maps and GPS to mark boundaries. They’ll be able to move their land titles and deeds to the cloud. Where there are disputes, the digital platforms will assist in arbitration. Civilians caught up in conflict and forced to flee could take pictures of all of their possessions and re-create a model of their home in virtual space. If they return, they’ll know exactly what is missing and may well be able to use a social-networking platform to locate the stolen items (after they’ve digitally verified that they own them).

  Automated Warfare

  When conflict escalates into armed combat, future participants will find the landscape of war to be nothing like it has been in the past. The opening of a virtual front to warfare will not change the fact that the most sophisticated automated weapons and soldiers must still operate in the physical world, never eliminating the essential role that human guidance and judgment play. But militaries that do not take into account this dual-world phenomenon (and their responsibilities in both) will find that, while new technology makes them far more efficient killing machines, they are hated and reviled as a result, making the problem of winning hearts and minds that much more difficult.

  The modern automation of warfare, through developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), constitutes the most significant shift in human combat since the invention of the gun. It is, as the military scholar Peter Singer notes in his masterly account of this trend, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, what scientists would call a “singularity”—a “state in which things become so radically different that the old rules break down and we know virtually nothing.” Much as with other paradigm shifts in history (germ theory, the invention of the printing press, Einstein’s theory of relativity), it is almost impossible to predict with any great accuracy how the eventual change to fully automated warfare will alter the course of human society. All we can do is consider the clues we see today, convey the thinking of people on the front lines, and make some educated guesses.

  Integrating information technology into the mechanics of warfare is not a new trend: DARPA, the Pentagon’s research-and-development arm, was created in 1958 as a response to the launch of Sputnik.4 The government’s determination to avoid being caught off guard again was such that DARPA’s mission is, quite literally, “to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military and prevent technological surprise from harming our national security.” Subsequently, the United States has led the world in sophisticated military technology, in everything from smart bombs to unmanned drones and bomb-defusing explosive-ordnance-disposal (EOD) robots. But, as we’ll discuss below, the United States may not hold that exclusive advantage for very long.

  It’s easy to understand why governments and militaries like robots and other unmanned systems for combat: They never tire, they never feel fear or emotion, they have superhuman capabilities and they always follow orders. As Singer points out, robots are uniquely suited to the roles that the military refers to as the three Ds (jobs that are dull, dirty or dangerous). The tactical advantages conferred by robots are constrained only by the limits of robotics manufacturers. They can build robots that withstand bullets, have perfect aim, recognize and disarm targets, and carry impossible loads in severe conditions of heat, cold or disorientation. Military robots have better endurance and faster reaction time than any soldier, and politicians will much more readily send them into battle than human troops. Most people agree that the introduction of robots into combat operations, whether on the ground, at sea or in the air, will ult
imately produce fewer combat deaths, fewer civilian casualties and less collateral damage.

  Already there are many forms of robots at work in American military operations. More than a decade ago, in 2002, iRobot, the company that invented the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, introduced a ground robot called the PackBot, a forty-two-pound machine with treads like a tank’s, cameras and a degree of autonomous functionality, that military units can equip to detect mines, sense chemical or biological weapons and investigate potential IEDs (improvised explosive devices) along the sides of roads or anywhere else.5 Another robotics manufacturer, Foster-Miller, makes a PackBot competitor called the TALON, as well as the first armed robot brought to battle: the Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System, or SWORDS. And then there are the aerial drones. In addition to the now recognizable Predator drones, the U.S. military operates smaller versions (like the hand-launched Raven drone, used for surveillance) and larger ones (like the Reaper, which flies higher, faster and with a larger weapons payload than the Predator). An internal congressional report acquired by Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog in 2012 stated that drones now account for 31 percent of all military aircraft—up from 5 percent in 2005.

  We spoke to a number of former and current Special Forces soldiers to gauge how they believed this progression of robotic technologies will affect combat operations in the next decades. Harry Wingo, a Googler and former Navy SEAL, spoke to the usefulness of using computers and “bots” instead of humans for surveillance, and of robots “taking point” in advancing through a field of fire or when clearing a building. In the next decade, he said, more “lethal kinetics”—operations involving fire—“will be handed over to bots, including those like room-clearing that require split-second parsing of targets.” Initially, the robots will be operated with “machine-assist,” meaning a soldier will direct the machine from a remote location, but eventually, Wingo believes, “the bots will identify and engage targets.” Since 2007, the U.S. military has deployed armed SWORDS robots that can semi-autonomously recognize and shoot human targets, though it is believed that they have not, as yet, been used in a lethal context.