By Toby Weir-Jones, By Toby Weir-Jones, Vice President of Product Development, BT Counterpane
Ron Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab, spoke recently at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC, about the rise of cyber crime and its geopolitical nature. He gave a brief high-level primer on basic malware techniques, but focused the bulk of his talk on the fact that all the classic jurisdictional issues, technical complexities and imbalance of power make for perhaps the least-level playing field around in any meta-democratic environment. He pointed out that 95% of the technical infrastructure that operates the internet is owned by the private sector; and he cited all the recent examples of more sophisticated worms and botnets, like GhostNet and Stuxnet, as examples of just how hard it is to isolate the threat and hold anyone accountable.
Ron also pointed out how cyber criminals themselves have evolved – from muggers, morphing into fine art thieves – and have learned to take advantage of technical capabilities far faster than law enforcement has learned how to deal with them. This is a familiar refrain for anyone with a corporate network who has tried to pinpoint the exact origin, nature and scope of an infection.
But the most interesting point of the talk was how it should be up to major national entities – countries, or big NGOs – to define best practices for what it means to have a free, democratic and unrestricted internet. He cited the flipping of the ”big switch” in Egypt recently, taking its ISPs offline to try and suppress the internet’s use for publicizing the real nature of the protests; and how futile an effort that proved to be. Ron suggested that Canada, in its traditional peacekeeping role, might take the lead on such an effort and try to enshrine basic concepts of net neutrality, free access and cross-border intra-jurisdictional policing against real criminals. Like other spaces – air, land and sea – the internet, despite being man-made, is still a container for communications, commerce and social activity, and its use has grown far faster than any other communications medium before.
The precedent that might be set if profit-seeking and totalitarian control become the operative norms — instead of treating the internet as another kind of peaceful assembly — is hugely dangerous and could easily spark another kind of cold war buildup. If the rumors about the origins of Stuxnet and Ghost Net are true, it’s likely that such a buildup, in terms of capabilities and objectives, is already well underway.
As individual users, those kinds of activities aren’t likely to target us directly, but we are all impacted by them when the unintended fallout of less-disciplined, rogue efforts gets loose in the wild. An open internet, at a minimum, allows us a better chance to uncover the nature of the threats and implement appropriate technical protections, and could ultimately lead to uniform legal standards of protection as well.
