Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/122908
C CyBer SecURIty a huge military industrial complex has sprouted up around cyber space that is especially attractive to ... these massive cold war giants. why I think that maybe something like the international telecommunications meeting in Dubai is a good meeting to have because at least it puts cyber space and its constitutive principles on the global agenda. We are at a constitutional moment in that people are beginning to think about what should be the foundational principles of cyber space. And that's a good conversation to have because it opens up issue areas that may have otherwise have been buried beneath the surface. Q That is a very fitting metaphor. Do you think this so-called constitutional moment is unprecedented? Absolutely, because we have never before had a planetary communications infrastructure that we have now. This level of individual empowerment is unprecedented. We live in a small space and that space is now bound by a communications ecosystem that is highly democratized and its foundation is stirring and being overturned gradually as the centre of gravity moves to the Global South and East. Q Do you have any Delphic predictions as to where you see cyber space moving and where you see our taken-for-granted consumption of this ecosystem going in, say, 30 years? I think that there are a number of factors that are pushing us further and further away from what we have become accustomed to over the past 10 years, and that is away from an open democratic common-pool-resource of information and communication to something that is more controlled along national territorial lines that is subject to highly competitive interaction among state's armed forces (there is an arms race in this space!). All of this together, combined with the demographic shift to the South and East, will likely put us in a much different communication environment unless we impose some kind of structure and oversight and discipline, if you will, in terms of how we govern this space. To do that we need to lift the lid on this technology and that begins by asking something as simple as, "what happens when I send this email? And where does that email go?" It is important to ask these questions rather than taking for granted these technologies that we so heavily rely on. Q Do you see a role for global organizations such as NATO that are, in fact, very tied up in and reliant on this state-based need-to-be-securitized approach to global politics? NATO is certainly acutely aware of cyber security and I think there are some interesting potential divisions within NATO that prove this. But the tendency right now is to develop some offensive 38 APRIL/mAy 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com capabilities and try to apply deterrence to cyber space which amplifies the military dimension and this moves us further and further away from the defensive posture. I think that this, generally, is counterproductive because it elicits the same response from our adversaries who may try to respond, but not using the same playbook. The Irans and Russias of the world may exploit the cyber criminal underworld to accomplish their form of active defense or deterrence in this space, which undermines the domain for all of us. This is why we need to see it as a common pool mixed resource – not quite a commons in the traditional sense because most of it is owned and operated by people who own our device, which is then part of this ecosystem that we share. Q Does this move us from what is traditionally known as cyber security to this idea of cyber warfare? There is no doubt that there is an ongoing arms race and, like all arms races, there is a political economy dimension to it that reinforces it at the same time. A huge military industrial complex has sprouted up around cyber space that is especially attractive to the likes of these massive cold war giants like Boeing and Northrop Grumman. So, yes, we are moving in this dangerous direction, which ultimately is to no one's benefit because we depend on this infrastructure being secure in order to communicate and access information. If we can't do that in an open and secure fashion, then we are really lost because we have some major global problems (economic vitality aside) – the future of planet earth needs a common communications system that functions well and is open. Q Do you think there might be some naivety among policymakers who might look at an argument like that and push it aside? After all (so the logic goes), cyber space yields no physical threat. Whereas in the Cold War the potential fall-out meant things like massive loss of life and irreparable damage to vital physical infrastructures, in the cyber context a massive attack might be seen as a temporary change that can relatively easily be reversed. This line of thinking exists. There is a qualitative difference between a nuclear attack and a cyber attack and I think that the analogy is sometimes overwrought. But at the same time, Stuxnet demonstrated the potential of computer network operations to sabotage physical infrastructure because we are increasingly linking critical infrastructure to the Internet. Those infrastructure have been shown to be vulnerable. There would be severe consequences if a blackout or an all-out cyber war happened. Until now it has been all but laughed off. We haven't devoted much resources to it but Chinese war plans have, built into them, degrading U.S. information capabilities. Q And as of now, you would say policymakers are largely complacent to this reality? Yes, even worse, I would say some of them are profiting off of it. Not so much in this country but in others.