Presented at the Student Pugwash USA 20th Anniversary Conference, “Science and Social Responsibility in the New Millennium”, San Diego, CA, June, 1999.
TCP/IPeace: The Internet as a Technology
for War or a Technology of Peace
Presented at “Science and Social Responsibility
in the New Millenniumâ€Student Pugwash USA Biennial Conference
San Diego, CA, USA; June 28th – July 4th, 1999
©1999 Jeff Porten. Contact the author before quoting or citing in other publications.
- Introduction
- A Brief History of Telecommunications
- TCP/IParanoia—The Internet as Technology for War
- TCP/IPeace—Internet and Conflict Prevention
- Replacing Violence with IPWar
- Endnotes
Introduction
This paper will explore some the changes being made to global society by adoption of and adaptation to the Internet, as they relate to the perception of war and their impacts on war and peace activities. This discussion begins with a contextual background of how earlier telecommunications technologies were viewed and implemented; proceeds to an overview of the uses of the Internet by those who would wage war and those who would stop it; and concludes with thoughts on how nonviolent conflict may be used instead of war in the information age.
A Brief History of Telecommunications
Prognosticators about the Internet—including this author—have a tendency to fall into the old trap of accentuating the positive about the wonders of new communications technologies, with a blind eye turned to what might be lurking in Pandora’s Box. As with most technologies, the Internet does not have an inherent positive or negative influence on society; its impact reflects the uses to which it is put. Communications technologies in particular have a history of being seen as the harbinger of brave new worlds, blossoming with expanded human potential. The history of previous wonders of their ages is instructive.(1)
The first mass electronic medium is still with us today in a vastly different form: the telephone. Although the phone virtually symbolizes one-to-one communication in our era, social forces and limitations of the technology during its early introduction made the telephone lines a social space. Lines were shared in “party lines†on which many people shared the circuit, and calls to outside lines where placed through a human operator, making a phone call one of the least private means of communication imaginable. During this period, the capability of the telephone as a rudimentary broadcast technology was clearly recognized by some, and some communities organized concerts and other events over the lines.
When the technology became available for callers to actually place their own calls, on a private line, many communities resisted the new system as an attack on the social order. The telephone, some thought, would increase social isolation and dysfunctional behavior, as people no longer needed to see each other to converse; these arguments would be repeated about the Internet decades later. There is no doubt that the telephone has fundamentally changed every society that has adopted it for widespread use—as can be proven by the elaborate social codes surrounding the phone, broken at the peril of caller and receiver—and it is likely that wireless and satellite services will soon bring the telephone to (or force it upon) the two billion people who have never made a phone call. However, in its earliest incarnation as a revolutionary medium, it was ultimately a failure.
In their times, the radio and television inspired the same lofty beliefs. Surely David Sarnoff, perfecting the techniques of transmitting grainy black-and-white pictures through midair in the 1920s, and the social reformers of the 1930s who envisioned the new device as a gateway to arts and culture, did not expect the most popular television show of the 1990s to be Baywatch. Millions around the world can listen to National Public Radio (U.S.) and the BBC World Service, but their audiences are surely dwarfed by the hundreds of millions listening to pop music and the likes of Howard Stern.
Now these hopes and fears have been pinned on the Internet, which—depending upon whose opinion is dominant—is: 1) the greatest repository of knowledge in the history of humankind; 2) the greatest attack on understanding in the history of humankind, as it replaces wisdom with sheer quantities of data; or 3) the greatest threat to morality in the history of humankind, as it gives every 10-year-old access to a vast library of pornography, subversive thought, and helpful how-to guides on bombmaking and other directories to mayhem. Of course, the Internet is all of these things, and probably a great deal more that we are only beginning to recognize.
In amelioration of my own bias—which in matters of cutting edge technology causes me to admire the air show when the sky is genuinely falling—I will summarize first the ways in which the Internet makes the world a potentially more threatening and dangerous place, then go on to analyze the impacts it may have on peaceful conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
TCP/IParanoia—The Internet as Technology for War
Early in the late 1980s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation recognized that it was facing a serious problem. Since the 1930s, they had had a right, within certain privacy and liberty safeguards, to “wiretap†a telephone line and listen in on the conversations of criminals and others of unproven perfidy. The origin of the right to do so was based on the copper-wire technology of the time; copper’s mode of transmitting telephone conversations made it relatively simple to attach a new wire to the line in question and duplicate the signal at another location. Five decades later, the use of this was so widespread, despite protests from civil libertarians, that many investigators could not imagine working without it.
The problem was that new telecommunications technologies are not as receptive to authority as copper was. Analog communication is based upon a relatively simple physics of energy and frequency; digital communication is based upon ones and zeros and is utterly unintelligible without the proper decoding algorithm. Telephones of the 1960s were basically microphones, speakers, and a few circuit switches; telephones of the 1990s are basically computers, with literally no limit on what they can do to modify the underlying signal.
Provide a technology that is well suited for illicit communications, and rest assured that the communicators of the illicit will take to it quickly. Some of the earliest adopters of computer bulletin board systems were the international networks of child pornography traders, and in Germany, the neo-Nazis. Today, while I doubt you can write to OsamaBinLaden@hotmail.com, it would be the height of foolishness to presume that paramilitary and terrorist organizations ranging from the Hezbollah to the Aryan Nation do not use the Internet to coordinate their activities and find new members and resources.
The Internet makes organizations such as the Girl Scouts and the Red Cross more effective and efficient; it must also do the same for groups with somewhat more sinister motives. The authorities’ response to this is the adaptation of old techniques to new media: infiltration and eavesdropping. These techniques snare many of the amateurs, but this also has the effect of winnowing the opposition down to the more competent. The net result of the Internet, in this arena, is better terrorists.
The attempt to curtail this effect in itself brings dangers, as police push for unprecedented power to monitor electronic communications. The ECHELON system, run by the U.S. National Security Agency, captures and records virtually every international electronic transmission. Internet companies have set the precedent that they will turn over email and other information to authorities upon request, and frequently without a warrant. The signal from cellular telephones can be used to track the movements of anyone who carries one (although this capability is largely yet to be implemented). The risk of the creation of a de facto police state and the end to privacy is seen by many to be a far worse threat than the presumed threat of terrorist activity. These effects are listed here as inciting violence, due to 1) the violence that is done to civilians in a police state when civil liberty protections are relaxed, and 2) the tendency of restrictive states to create more virulent terrorist movements in response.
The last war effect of the Internet is the new field of battle that the Internet itself creates. It is far beyond the scope of this paper to track the myriad ways in which information warfare can now be waged, but suffice to say that most of the worst excesses of apocalyptic fiction are in fact quite plausible from a technical perspective. It is questionable whether a massive military attack or the permanent crashing of the New York Stock Exchange would have greater detrimental effect on the United States. The Internet is part and parcel of a vastly complicated network of systems upon which the modern economy depend, and as the Y2K bug has shown, there are no easy methods to guard against attack. The ability of programmers to accidentally include a major flaw indicates the possibility of such weaknesses being introduced from the outside.
TCP/IPeace—Internet and Conflict Prevention
The Internet’s potential for mayhem is counterbalanced in several areas in which the network provides new, and in some cases unprecedented, mechanisms for conflict prevention. These are: 1) individuals acting as a check on nation-states; 2) rejection of violence as a result of instantaneous reporting; and 3) the near-impossibility of censorship of minority and persecuted populations.(2)
Ad Hoc Sunshine
One major flaw in the “Internet as warmongering technology†argument above should be clear. Throughout, I do not discuss war between nation-states, but between police forces and terrorists. The reason for this should be equally clear: while the Internet provides major benefits to governments and their militaries, by and large it just gives them a faster and cheaper method of doing what they always have done. The military of a nation-state may use the Net to supplement their C3I capabilities, but in few cases does the Internet create capability where none has been before.
Unlike nearly every predecessor technology, the power of the Internet primarily accrues at the individual level. If freedom of the press belongs only to the people who own a printing press, the number of owners of presses is several orders of magnitude larger now than with past technologies. Individuals can now do what required the resources of a government in past decades. It is a certainty that instigators of violence will use these technologies, but members of civil society will use them in greater frequency. If we trust that humanity has a greater percentage of beneficial than malevolent actors, the net sum of the Internet’s societal impacts will be positive.
The Internet also gives nearly all members of civil society the opportunity to act as a check and balance on the actions of nation-states. Verification techniques for NBC weaponry, small arms, and other offensive systems that fall under the rubric of international treaty increasingly call for (and in some cases, require) individuals to serve as honest sources when governments act in a deceitful manner. It is virtually impossible for any networked society to guarantee that the veil of silence will encompass all those actors who might use the Internet to tip off inspectors that all is not well in the state of Denmark.
In the United States, the term “sunshine provision†refers to a governmental obligation to reveal certain activities to the public. With the Internet serving as the medium, the whole of global civil society becomes the mechanism by which sunshine may be let into the dark corners of national activities.
The Eradication of Clean War
The myth of the clean war is the new driving force, with special emphasis in the United States. Beginning in the Gulf War, civilian populations were seduced by the possibility of war waged with few or no casualties sustained by the attacking nation, through the magic of smart bombs, stealth fighters, and other very expensive armaments that removed the immediate risk of large scale casualties sustained by anyone other than the defending military force.
In the United States, the memory of Vietnam is fresh in the minds of the planners and observers of war. For the first time, civilians at home were able to receive daily images direct from the front, often shocking in their brutality. The rising body counts and evening dinnertime broadcasts of new carnage are credited with accelerating the end of that war, and have contributed to American reluctance to wage war since. During the Persian Gulf and Kosovo conflicts, both sides were exceedingly careful to monitor what images made it back to the televisions at home.
But during the next war, there will be hundreds or thousands of civilians, unwillingly or by choice, in the thick of the war with video cameras and video-capable computers. Even if the combat takes place in a region where personal electronics are not common, a reporter with a backpack of equipment can become an instant television studio. Moreover, as satellite telecommunications become more available, it will no longer be possible to easily sever a combat region’s connection to the rest of the world.
The added ease of getting video images out of these regions (which, it must be said, will not be “easyâ€, so much as much less difficult as in past wars) will contribute to a “Vietnamization†of future conflicts. Carefully censored images from the Gulf War gave Americans the impression that Baghdad was merely the site of a large-scale video game, and induced a lull in the populace. The opposite imagery from the next war will have an opposite effect, aiding the mobilization of antiwar groups and peace activists.(3)
The End of Marginalization
Why did the international community through NATO intervene in Kosovo while doing little during the Rwandan genocide? One of many reasons must include the focus of the media on American and European events as somehow more important or relevant than events in Africa. News managers in Washington have claimed, perhaps speciously, that Rwanda was underreported simply because the infrastructure for reporting in Africa is not as developed as it is in Europe.
By the end of the next decade, it is unlikely that there will be anywhere on the planet without Internet access through some combination of wire and satellite access; most of the planet will have multiple choice of access. It is too much to expect that this will automatically provide a voice to the internationally voiceless, or that the wealthy nations will automatically give more consideration to the poorer nations—but as the Internet reaches a better cross-section of the global population, it seems impossible that the “second-class citizens†of the world will remain at quite the same status.
Replacing Violence with IPWar
Perhaps the most telling indicator for the future of war—and a potential entry into a war-free world—is watching where war is taking place today. If one expands the definition of war to include nonviolent conflict, most nations of the world are constantly at war with one another through economic and diplomatic feints and counterthrusts. The closest of allies wage nonviolent combat at GATT and WTO meetings, and the victors take very clear spoils.
Meanwhile, it is difficult to find former enemies of the United States that have not been co-opted as economic partners. Germany, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Russia, China, and soon Kosovo, Serbia, and Montenegro, have been flooded with American money and products post-conflict, for the ultimate furthering of mutual economic self-interest. Economic considerations make military conflict between many nations unthinkable. And as has been pointed out before, economic conflict can cause devastation no less complete over the long run as military conflict—if such an outcome is deemed as necessary or desirable, nations still have options short of military conflict to inflict damage upon an enemy.
Conflict is perhaps an innate part of human nature, but our society has now built other realms where conflict can be played out other than the battlefield—the economy, the interactions between multinational corporations and nation-states, the diplomatic realm, and increasingly, the Internet itself and the underlying information infrastructure. Given a choice between the present world, and a world which has conflict in all of these realms but which has lessened or renounced the use of military action to resolve dispute, the proper path to take is clear.
Aside from the horrible deprivations that war causes, war is many other things: inefficient, dangerous to those in power, expensive, and wasteful of resources. Ultimately, the way to end war may be to subtly encourage nation-states and their successors that there is more money to be made, more prosperity to be had, and perhaps a greater national advantage on the battlefields of commerce and cyberspace than the battlefields of soldiers and weaponry.
The “war to end all wars†did not succeed in that aim because there was insufficient technology and social infrastructure to put an end to war. It is still questionable whether our current technologies and social institutions are up to the task, but one Rubicon has distinctly been crossed. The industrial economy thrived on war and military conflict. The information economy—with its emphasis on expanding markets and economic growth, on wealth created in minds rather than in metal—thrives on peace.
Endnotes
1. Although I make an effort in this paper to be less Americentric, most of the historical data in this section is taken from American experience. If I do not specifically indicate otherwise, cultural and historical references refer to the United States; if I accidentally make a sweeping globalization where commentary is more accurately assigned only to the U.S., please point it out to me so I may correct the error. Return to text.
2. I am tempted to add a fourth component: the idea that increasing communication between the peoples of the world can decrease the appetite for war as a consequence of having more knowledge of, or personal contacts among, the people who would be attacked. I find it difficult to support this concept in the face of civil wars and other conflicts between peoples who know each other well, and who hate each other regardless. Nevertheless, I do believe that at some point in the future a war will be averted or ceased by email between the targeted population and the civilian population of the attackers. Return to text.
3. A valid argument can be made as to whether this is necessarily a positive development. If one accepts the doctrine of the just war, then just wars become more difficult to wage as well in this environment. Considering the carnage of World War II—widely seen as the quintessential just war—it is disturbing to consider if American involvement would have been curtailed if that war were broadcast home on CNN. Return to text.