The New Digital Age Read online

  Nobody understands this combination of political pressures and technological challenges better than Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who is both a regional leader and a computer scientist by training. “The Internet is good for letting off steam,” he told us, “but it can also be used to create new fires. The danger we face in the future is that it will be far easier to be against something than for it.” Young people everywhere, he explained, always want to be part of something cool, and “this social experience of being against authority means young people no longer need a plan. It has become far too easy for very minor events to escalate into lots of online activity that is exploited by opposition groups.”

  Lee pointed to a recent event in his own country, known colloquially as “Currygate.” “A Chinese immigrant and a Singaporean of Indian descent quarreled over the right to cook curry, given that the aroma seeps through the walls,” Lee said. The Chinese man considered his neighbor’s constant curry cooking inconsiderate, and, “in typical Singaporean fashion,” the two brought in a mediator to resolve the dispute. An agreement was reached: The Indian would cook curry only when his neighbor was out of town. That was the end of it until, years later, the mediator went public with his story. The Indian community in Singapore was outraged, incensed by the idea that the Chinese could dictate when people did or did not cook curry, and the situation escalated quickly. According to Lee, “What began as the declaration of a national curry-cooking day led to thousands of ‘likes’ and posts and a viral movement that captured the attention of the entire country.” Luckily for Lee, the online agitation around curry didn’t lead to massive protests in the streets, even though the rhetoric was highly charged at the time.

  The protests in Singapore had little to do with curry and everything to do with the growing concerns about foreigners (particularly mainland Chinese) coming in and taking jobs. Unsurprisingly, opposition groups keen to push this agenda found Currygate an easy episode to exploit. For a country like Singapore, which prides itself on stability, efficiency and the rule of law, the broadcasting of such anger from so many citizens revealed a vulnerability in its system: Even in as tightly controlled a space as Singapore, government restrictions and social codes have limited leverage in the online world. For Lee, the episode foreshadowed a tide of online expression that the Singaporean leadership acknowledges will be impossible to roll back. If even the authorities in Singapore are feeling the heat of a newly connected civil society, imagine how nervous more fragile governments in other parts of the world must feel.

  We asked Lee how he thought China would handle this transition, given that, in a decade, almost a billion Chinese citizens will become connected in a heavily censored society. “What happens in China is beyond anyone’s full control, even the Chinese government,” he said. “China will have a difficult time accommodating all of these new voices, and the transition from a minority of the population online to the majority is going to be difficult for the leaders.” Concerning the subject of leadership, he added, “Successive generations of Chinese leaders will not have the charisma or communications skills to generate momentum among the population. In this sense, the virtual world will become far cooler and far more relevant to the Chinese people than the physical world.” Change, he said, would not just come from people outside the system: “It is people inside the system, the cadres of the Chinese establishment, who are influenced by the [street] chatter and who also have skeptical views of the legitimacy of the government.”

  We agree with Lee and other regional experts that China’s future will not necessarily be bright. Some interpret projections of declining economic growth, an aging population and technology-driven change as indications that the Chinese state will soon be fighting for survival in its current form, while others suggest instead that these impending challenges will ultimately spur even more innovation and problem-solving from China. But ultimately it is difficult for us to imagine how a closed system with 1.3 billion people, huge socioeconomic challenges, internal ethnic issues and robust censorship will survive the transition to the new digital age in its current form. With greater connectivity will come greater expectations, demands and accountability that even the world’s largest surveillance state will not be able to control fully. In instances where law enforcement goes too far or cronies of the regime engage in reckless behavior that causes physical harm to Chinese citizens, we will see more public movements demanding accountability. Because ministers loathe embarrassment, pressure from weibos and other online forums can result in more pressure and change, eventually curbing the excesses of one-party rule.

  So while the Internet may not democratize China overnight, increased public accountability will put at least some pressure on the regime to act on the public’s demands for justice. And if economic growth should noticeably slow down, it could create a revolutionary opening for some elements of the population. China will experience some kind of revolution in the coming decades, but how widespread and effective it is will come down to the willingness of the population to take risks both online and in the streets.

  Future revolutions, wherever they happen and whatever form they take, may change regimes, but they will not necessarily produce democratic outcomes. As Henry Kissinger told us, “The history of revolutions is a confluence of resentment that reaches an explosive point and it then sweeps away the existing structure. After that, there is either chaos or a restoration of authority which varies in inverse proportion to the destruction of previous authority.” In other words, following a successful revolution, “the more authority is destroyed, the more absolute the authority that follows is,” Kissinger said. Having experienced successful and failed revolutions over more than forty years, he has deep knowledge of their designs and character. The United States and Eastern Europe are the only cases, according to him, in which the destruction of the existing structure led to the creation of a genuine democracy. “In Eastern Europe,” he explained, “the revolutions succeeded because the experience of dictatorship was so bad, and there was a record of being Western and part of the democratic tradition, even if they were never democracies.”

  While Kissinger’s point about the distinctness of Eastern Europe is well taken, we cannot dismiss the role that incentives play in the success of revolutions. We would be remiss to leave out the incredibly important incentive of being able to join the European Union (E.U.). If E.U. membership had not been available as a political motive for liberal elites and populations as a whole and also as a stabilizing factor, we would likely have seen much more backsliding and counterrevolution in a number of different countries. This is why the Western powers had to expand NATO and offer E.U. membership.

  The absence of this democratic culture is part of the reason the overthrow of dictatorships during the Arab Spring produced, in the eyes of some, merely watered-down versions of autocracies instead of pure Jeffersonian democracies. “Instead of having all power consolidated under one dictator,” Kissinger said, “they split themselves into various parties—secular and non-secular—but ultimately find themselves dominated by one Muslim party running a token coalition government.” The result will be coalition governments, which “The New York Times will welcome as an expression of great democracy,” he joked, but really, “at the end of that process stands a government without opposition, even if it comes into being in a one-off election.”

  Autocratic-leaning coalition governments, Kissinger predicts, will often be the form new governments produced by digital revolutions assume in the coming decades, less because of technology than because of the lack of strong, singular leaders. Without a dominant leader and vision, power-sharing governments emerge as the most viable option to pacify most participants, yet they’ll always run the risk of not distancing themselves sufficiently from the previous regime or the older generation of political actors.

  Revolutions are but one manifestation of discontent. They stick out in our memories because they can often adopt romantic overtones, and be easily wov
en into human narratives about freedom, liberty and self-determination. With more technology come more anecdotes that capture our imagination and make nice headlines. Even when unsuccessful, revolutionaries occupy a particular position in our collective history that confers a certain respect, if begrudgingly so. These are highly important components in human political development, central to our understanding of citizenship and social contracts, and the next generation of technologies will not change this.

  But while revolutions are how some pursue change within the system or express their discontent with the status quo, there will always be people and groups who pursue the same objectives through the most devastating and violent means. Terrorists and violent extremists will be as much a part of our future as they are our present. The next chapter will delve into the radicalization hotbeds of our future—both in the physical world and online—and explain how an extended battlefield will change the nature of terrorism and what tools we have to fight it.

  1 Feature extraction automatically identifies the presence, absence or status of important characteristics of a data set. In this case, key features might include the grade level of the writing, the frequency of emotionally charged words and the number of people cited in contexts, thereby indicating mentorship.

  2 The post, by the Internet research firm Renesys, displayed stunning data charts that showed the near-immediate disconnection of Egypt’s ISPs from the global network.

  3 There was one exception to this all-ISP block: Noor Group, which provided service to several prominent institutions like the Egyptian Stock Exchange and the Egyptian Credit Bureau, was left unrestricted until three days later.

  4 The Egyptian regime was notoriously harsh on its underground gay community; on one infamous occasion, the Cairo vice squad raided a floating nightclub called the Queen Boat and arrested fifty-five men, dozens of whom were convicted of debauchery and sent to prison.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Future of

  Terrorism

  As we’ve made clear, technology is an equal-opportunity enabler, providing powerful tools for people to use for their own ends—sometimes wonderfully constructive ends, but sometimes unimaginably destructive ones. The unavoidable truth is that connectivity benefits terrorists and violent extremists too; as it spreads, so will the risks. Future terrorist activity will include physical and virtual aspects, from recruitment to implementation. Terrorist groups will continue to kill thousands annually, by bombs or other means. This is all very bad news for the broader public, states that already have enough trouble protecting their homeland in the physical world, and companies that will be increasingly vulnerable.

  And of course there remains the terrifying possibility that one of these groups will acquire a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon. Because of the developed world’s increasing dependence on its own connectedness—nearly every system we have is tied to a virtual network in some way—we’re acutely vulnerable to cyber terrorism in its various forms. That applies, of course, even in less-connected places, where the majority of terrorist attacks occur today. The technical skills of violent extremists will grow as they develop strategies for recruitment, training and execution in the virtual world, with the full understanding that their attacks will be more visible than ever before thanks to the increasing reach of global social-media networks.

  But despite those gains, communication technologies also make terrorists far more vulnerable than they are today. For all the advantages that living in the virtual world give terrorists (small cells all over the world, destructive activities that are harder to trace), they still have to live physically (eat, be sheltered, be in a physical space from which they use their phones and computers), and that’s precisely what makes them more vulnerable in the new digital age. Here we will explore how terrorists will split their time between the physical and virtual worlds and why despite some advantages gained, they will ultimately make more mistakes and implicate more people, making their violent business far more difficult.

  New Reach, New Risks

  That the Internet provides dangerous information for potential criminals and extremists is well known; less understood is how this access will evolve on a global scale in the future. Many of the populations coming online in the next decade are very young and live in restive areas, with limited economic opportunities and long histories of internal and external strife. It follows, then, that in some places, the advent of the new digital age will also mean an increase in violent activity fueled by the greater availability of technology. A strong indication that that process is under way will be the proliferation of sophisticated homemade explosive devices.

  While traveling in Iraq in 2009, we were struck by the notion that it was far too easy to be a terrorist. An Army captain told us that one of the greatest shared fears among American troops on patrol was the hidden roadside IED (improvised explosive device). In the war’s early days, IEDs were expensive to produce and required special materials, but with time, bomb-making tools and accessible instructions were widely available to any potential insurgent. The IED of 2009 was cheaper and more innovative, designed to evade now-understood countermeasures with simple adaptations. A bomb with its trigger taped to a mobile phone set on “vibrate” could be detonated remotely by calling that number. (The Americans soon responded to this tactic by introducing jamming systems to cut off mobile communication, with limited success.) What was once a sophisticated and lucrative violent activity (earning insurgents thousands of dollars) had become routine, an option for anyone with a bit of initiative willing to be paid in cigarettes.

  If an insurgent’s mobile-phone-triggered IED is now the equivalent of a high school science project, what does that tell us about the future? These “projects” are an unfortunate consequence of what the Android creator Andy Rubin describes as the “maker phenomenon” in technology, which outside the terrorism context is often applauded. “Citizens will more easily become their own manufacturers by piecing together versions of today’s products to make something that had previously been too hard for an ordinary citizen to build,” Rubin told us. The emerging “maker culture” around the world is producing an untold number of ingenious creations today—3-D printers are just the beginning—but as with most technology movements, there is a darker side to innovation.

  The future homemade terror device will likely be a combination of “everyman” drones and mobile IEDs. Such drones could be purchased online or at a toy store; indeed, simple remote-control helicopters are already available. The AR.Drone quadricopter, built by Parrot, was one of the top-selling toys of the 2011–2012 Christmas season. These toys are already equipped with a camera and can be piloted by a smart phone. Imagine a more complicated version that uses a Wi-Fi connection it generates itself and that is fitted with a homemade bomb on its undercarriage, producing a whole new level of domestic terror that is just around the corner. The knowledge, resources and technical skills necessary to produce such a drone will certainly be available practically everywhere in the near future. The autonomous navigation capability we discussed previously will become generally available and embeddable on a chip, which will make it easier for terrorists and criminals to stage a drone-based attack without intervention. Improved destructive capacity in physical attacks is just one way the spread of technology will affect global terrorism. Cyber terrorism, of course, is another—the term itself dates back to the 1980s—and the threat will grow only graver. For our purposes, we’ll define cyber terrorism as politically or ideologically motivated attacks on information, user data or computer systems intended to result in violent outcomes. (There is some overlap in tactics between cyber terrorism and criminal hacking, but generally the motivations distinguish the two.)

  It’s hard to imagine extremist groups operating out of caves in Tora Bora constituting a cyber threat, but as connectivity spreads throughout the world, even remote places will have reasonable network access and sophisticated mobile handsets. We have to assume that these groups will also
acquire the technical skills necessary to launch cyber attacks. Those changes, and the fact that our own connectedness presents an endless number of potential targets for extremists, are not promising developments.

  Consider some straightforward possibilities. If cyber terrorists successfully compromise the network security of a large bank, all of its customers’ data and money will be at risk. (Even calling in a threat, in the proper circumstances, could cause a run on the bank.) If cyber terrorists target a city’s transportation system, police data, stock market or electricity grid, they could bring the daily mechanics of the city to a halt.

  The security shields of some institutions and cities will prevent this, but not everyone will have such protection. Nigeria, which struggles with domestic terrorism and weak institutions, is already a world leader in online scams. As the connectivity of the cities of Lagos and Abuja extends to the more restive and rural north (where violent extremism is most prevalent), many would-be scammers could easily be attracted to the cause of a violent Islamist group like Boko Haram (Nigeria’s version of the Taliban). Only a handful of new recruits could transform Boko Haram from West Africa’s most dangerous terrorist organization into its most powerful cyber-terrorist one.

  Cyber-terrorist attacks need not be limited to system interference, either. Narco-terrorists, cartels and criminals in Latin America lead the world in kidnappings, but in the future, traditional kidnapping will be riskier, given trends like precision geo-location in mobile phones. (Even if kidnappers destroy a captive’s phone, its last known location will have been recorded somewhere in the cloud. Security-conscious individuals in countries where kidnapping is widespread will likely also have some form of wearable technology, something the size of a pin, which would continuously transmit their location in real time. And some who are most at risk may even have variations of those physical augmentations we wrote about earlier.) Virtual kidnappings, on the other hand—stealing the online identities of wealthy people, anything from their bank details to public social-network profiles, and ransoming the information for real money—will be common. Rather than keep and maintain captives in the jungle, guerrillas in the FARC or similar groups will prefer the reduced risk and responsibility of virtual hostages.