The power position, then, is to have exclusive information. But to know your information is exclusive, you must also know what the other players know. Knowing what they want to do with their information would be helpful as well.
If you know who else has certain information and a certain goal – and if they don't know – your actions will be more successful than theirs: You can anticipate, they can't.
The more information you have, the easier it is for you to understand, value, classify and incorporate the other information you have. So, the castle dweller wants to know everything, and to assure that everyone else knows only what you want them to know... and that most of that should be misinformation.
We think you can see how this turns into an information war of all (or at least all the castles) against all.
20th century intelligence was, by nature, considerably less Hobbesian and tended to diffuse conflicts. For example, the intelligence departments of the various powers were nearly always in contact with each other via back channels. They may have traded both truth and lies, but they did so on a regular basis. In effect, they were dancing in the dark with only one or two fingers touching. They were forever trying to feel where the other was moving and guessing at what their intents might be. As a result, they often stepped on each other's toes, but tended to back-off afterward. This created small conflicts, but also avoided larger ones. Overall, intelligence was humanized and included professional respect.
In the 21st century, the back channels are vanishing and Big Data (the process of using massive data flows; more on this later) is taking over. The old, slow and clumsy method of “dancing in the dark” no longer diffuses conflicts.
During the cold war, the players always leaked some of their successes. But in a true information age, you gain the best position if no one knows anything about you at all. No one wants their capacities known, and ideally no one knows that they exist. As a result, intelligence work is moving ever deeper into the shadows.
But in addition to the hiding of intelligence power, we are experiencing its individualization. By that we mean that there are many more individuals who can wield intelligence power. During the cold war, few people could make final decisions and use the agency's power. In our time, more and more people are in positions to use that power directly... and all face incentives that make them want to hide their abilities.
So, in our new world of intelligence, the nature of information pushes everyone into conflict with everyone else, and that includes the individuals inside intelligence agencies and mega-corps like Google and Facebook.
Other New Factors
Before we proceed, we'd like to note some fundamental factors of the new age of intelligence:
1. An increase of information means an increase in the value of espionage. Because of this, espionage will become a normal mode of operating, and one that will become increasingly dominant.
2. The future will become increasingly complex, because of automated manipulation.
3. The mediators of networks have the highest positions of power and will surpass even what used to be called “the money powers,” who sat at the pinnacle during the last half of the 20th century. And, just as businesses had to maintain a close relationship with commercial banks in the 20th century, they will have to keep a close relationship with network mediators in the 21st century... a rather frightening prospect. (We'll discuss networks in the next chapter.)
4. Anonymity and encryption are the new ways to secure your property; the equivalent of the lock on your front door. (Properly, the issue is exclusivity, but anonymity and encryption are how we obtain exclusivity.)
5. For physical objects, “where is it?” is a fundamental factor. For information, the equivalent fundamental factors are “who knows?” and “who knows who knows?” Without these, nothing can be acted upon, just as physical objects cannot be acted upon unless we know where they are.
6. Until recently, information was hard to use. Typically, it was recorded with paper and ink, and read by humans. Now, handling information is orders of magnitude easier. We have become better at handling information than matter.
Taken together, these factors explain a great deal about the new world of the 21st century. It is a world built around a different type of power.
Weapons, Offensive and Defensive
The balance between offensive and defensive weapons has been crucial in shaping human organization. When offensive weapons can overpower defensive weapons, the result is centralized, hierarchical organization. When defensive weapons can overpower offensive weapons, the result is decentralization. Professor Carol Quigley discusses this in his The Evolution of Civilizations:
For any government to function, it must be able to know what is happening at a distance, to communicate its orders, and to enforce obedience to them. The enforcement of obedience to orders cannot go further than the limit of the superiority of offensive power over defensive power.
In the 20th century, offensive weapons like artillery, aircraft, gunboats and missiles had a massive advantage over defensive weapons like firearms. In the early middle ages, however, the conditions were precisely the opposite, as Quigley goes on to explain:
... anyone who had a castle could say “no” to any order and could not be forced to submit. This means that every such castle became a nucleus of political independence and, since there were thousands of such castles in Europe , it meant that Europe was divided into thousands of independent political units and that centralized political power over any extended area was impossible.
A very interesting and unusual aspect of the information age is that defensive power is readily available, but is so far seldom used.
The defensive weapons of the information age are encryption and anonymity technologies. Encryption prevents others from understanding our information; it gives us exclusivity over the information and assures that only those who we wish to understand it can actually understand it.
But while encryption is a powerful tool, it is not enough in itself. If public networks are used, the network mediators retain access to all metadata – all the data about that data – which is an extremely powerful tool itself. If I know who you talk to, when, and who those people talk to... and if I also know the volume of information you all send to each other, and the timing of that information... I can probably glean the information I need about you (like your social graph), even if you use unbreakable encryption the whole time.
To counteract the gathering of metadata, additional tools are required. Those tools include darknet technologies, high-latency communications, and the physical delivery of data.
These tools are inexpensive and easy to use, but in order to use them, individuality and will are required. No hierarchical authority in an information age will encourage people to protect their data from them. In fact, they can be expected to undermine that ability whenever they can... as the NSA has already done[11].
Acting in one's own defense has been conditioned out of the modern populace, and people fear using even simple encryption. It is fine if someone provides it for them, but they fear obtaining it and using it directly.
The core issue of defense has thus become individual human will. Those who can exercise their will can protect themselves with powerful defensive weapons. Those who are unable to exercise their wills (outside the lines drawn by authority) will be fully unprotected and easy game.
Strangely, the situation really does resemble The Matrix (the 1999 movie): Those who are able to handle reality can protect themselves, but those who cannot exercise their wills are “lived” by the network mediators, and turned into Agent Smiths where and when the mediators wish.
How often it is, then, that the heaven or hell of human life comes back to simple yet profound virtues and vices.
Real Life At Intelligence Agencies
A few words are in order to explain real life at intelligence agencies. Let's begin with this: If you know intelligence only from the outside, please, please,
please get James Bond out of your mind. Bond makes for fine entertainment, but 007 is as nearly as far removed from actual intelligence work as the Man In The Moon is from aviation.
Furthermore, there are many intelligence agencies, and by no means are all of them organs of states. Large commercial and even religious organizations have their own intelligence agencies. We'll focus on state intelligence agencies here, but they are not the only kind.
To understand any intelligence operation, you must first understand its motives and its constraints.
State intelligence agencies provide a knowledge service, to a very specific market. It is a relationship between producers and consumers. States create multiple intelligence agencies so that those agencies compete; this provides better information and prevents a takeover by a single agency. Consider what might happen if there were one intelligence agency only: That agency would have a monopoly on all the most valuable information, and would be in a prime position to take over the entire government.
Remember what we said earlier about knowledge being more effective than either violence or money. Having a single intelligence agency would be a major threat to any state.
It is important to understand that what intelligence agencies produce is proprietary business information. When an agency briefs the President, it doesn't tell him or her how it knows these things, only that it knows them. This person is also a customer of their competitors[12]. So, agencies do not reveal their sources and methods; they will protect them above all else.
If a piece of information would lead to a clue about your source or method of obtaining information, you don't give it to anyone, including your consumers, unless and until you have an alternate legend for why you know it[13].
Intelligence agencies sometimes know far more than the President can act upon. So, they protect sources and methods as a matter of course, and this overridden only in exceptional cases.
In the end, the practice of intelligence is about information dominance. It's often desirable to have your agency penetrated by an opposing agency, provided that you know about it, of course. If you captured the counter-spy, you would gain little and your opponent would gain valuable information about your defenses. Cases like this are not uncommon, and, in fact, most of what intelligence agencies do is addressed to each other's intelligence agencies.
In addition, most of the information taken in by an intelligence agency is not secret information. Of all the information that makes a Presidential briefing, 80% or more comes from public sources. 20% or less comes from covert sources.
It is interesting that most intelligence agencies were not traditionally involved in physical actions. Their job was not to change the world, but to gather information.
Information gathering and political action conflict with each other. Information gathering requires that you are not discovered, and that you do not dilute your information. When you interact with a system, however, you change the state of that system. Then, whatever you read from that system is partly what you wrote. You end up polluting your own information.
It is also of some interest that US intelligence agencies were built by the investment banks, since no one else knew how to do intelligence work. Bill Donovan, who ran the OSS (precursor to the CIA) during World War II was a Wall Street lawyer and hired from his own back yard. Intelligence, far more than is acknowledged, has been a nepotistic business. The modern question is whether or not the tech startups have joined in this legacy. And in many cases, we know that the answer is “yes;” American tech companies – especially the most successful ones – are joined to the US intelligence complex[14].
When InQTel (the CIA's venture capital unit) puts millions of dollars into new start-ups, what happens to those employees? Do they stay where they are or do they become something else? Is a “commercial entity” like Booz Allen Hamilton, 99% of whose business comes from the US government, truly a private firm? Is it anything but yet another spy agency?
Furthermore, technology and intelligence agencies come together via investment bankers. NSA wants the geeks and CIA wants the CEOs. The West coast and Langley[15] come together via the Eastern money elite. CIA agents, for decades, have traveled under commercial cover, first via investment banks and now, seemingly, under the cover of tech companies. That gives them access to both money streams and information streams.
What we can expect in the future, by virtue of this mixture, is that companies and private organizations will see an influx from government operatives. They will act as intelligence agencies on their own, possibly get involved in wet work[16], and much of the national intelligence apparatus will become a consumer, not a producer. The head of the FBI kept an office at Facebook for a good while (and perhaps still does)... he's a partner.
3
Coalitions of The Connected
Western states are turning increasingly into network societies and becoming characterized by multi-level governance...
– George Dimitriu and Isabelle Duyvesteyn, The Future of Intelligence
Probably the most defining aspect of the early 21st century is the recognition of the “network” as not only a metaphor, but a descriptive term and constructive principle. While we previously thought about the world in terms of “blocks,” “monolithic organizations,” “nations,” or “independent hierarchies” that lent themselves to be depicted in flow charts and political tomes, we are now seeing fluid interdependencies, interactions and influences between entities. The network has become the new gestalt of both social and technical systems. This is of great importance to the understanding of both the organization of power and the projection of power through means of enforcement.
In the last few decades power has increasingly been organized in networks: Social networks of influencers, extra- and supranational networks of governance, networks of power brokers. We've seen the creation of organizations that operate as networks to protect the climate, mediate access to natural resources, foster sustainable development or support free trade.
These constructs are not monolithic hierarchies or temporary expressions of inter-governmental alliances like those set up in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rather, they continue their existence as fluid and often undefined interrelationships between decision makers, media, influencers and profiteers. They have developed a life of their own, independent of their creators in government and any initial legitimization they might have had.
In addition to the constructive principle for organizations of power the network has also been discovered as the descriptive and analytical concept for how power can be projected. That is, by exploiting the dependence of people on networks. Be it communication, electricity distribution, food supply or banking, the modern world is built on technical and legal webs of entities that are able to provide the services we need only in cooperation. These network have made a more efficient and globally distributed economy possible... an economy that we frankly depend on for our lives or at least for our lifestyles.
Networks have become the dominant model because of their efficiency, reliability, and their indirect (often invisible) control. They simply work better than the 20th century's monolithic governments, and they will undermine them in the years to come.
Let's consider just one, small example of the speed, efficiency and power of networks, as opposed to governmental processes: The ubiquitous credit report.
More or less every person of the middle class or higher (at least in the West) has a credit report that drastically affects his or her life. In fact, the credit report has more effect on the average person than do most laws, and certainly more effect than the results of the next election.
Yet control over the credit rating agencies belongs very little to the state, and primarily to the major banks who acknowledge and fund them. The credit agencies may need to keep politicians happy, but those politicians have a still greater obligation: to keep their funders happy, and that group of funders features those same major banks. And so, the credit ratings agencies are
controlled by networks of power, not by a single, defined entity.
If, next year, the ratings agencies decide that credit ratings will be cut for citizens who fail to insure their property according to their standards, millions of people will be pushed into upgrading their insurance. Ads will suddenly appear, warning people to “upgrade your insurance now, or lose up to 50 points off your credit score!” Already, credit ratings have forced millions (and scores of millions to be sure) to keep their debt load up, because having no debt at all hurts your credit rating.
Credit rating agencies are but one example of many, but they make the point: Power applied through networks is faster, more precise, is nearly immune from repercussions, and leaves the users of power fully outside of public view.
It should be no surprise, therefore, that building new networks of power is the ruling fetish of the age. Indeed, the biggest pieces of legislation – NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obamacare – have been precisely those that created new networks.
So, power no longer seeks the state as much as it does networks.
It should also be noted that networking power is resilient. Not only is it more or less invisible – there's no face to blame when credit standards change – but its power rests on the dependencies that our complex civilization has introduced. Given the fact that an increasing supply of goods and services, even access to work, is only available and mediated through networks, modern society has created a situation of inertia in which any change is associated with nearly insurmountable cost.
Unknown and certainly unwilled by the village people, we have been brought into a situation of path-dependency where the past decisions of the castle-dwellers have shaped a future that is both unfathomable for most and too all-encompassing to change.
The New Age of Intelligence Page 3
