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Mit Sicherheit scheitern

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Mit Sicherheit scheitern
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The End of One-Internet
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Eighteen years ago, John Perry Barlow derided the "weary giants of flesh and steel" — today, they control the Internet. The idea of a communicational one-world has been superseded by the giants' power-grabbing approach. This talk discusses different types of possible Internet security institutions, their viability, and their ability to achieve traditional Internet values embedded in open source ideas. The choice between technological cosmopolitanism, a fire brigades-design, an Internet government, informational hegemony, and noospheric empire fundamentally influences which values the Internet can yield.
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Information securityElectronic GovernmentInternetworkingEndliche ModelltheorieAuthorizationGame controllerMachine visionFunction (mathematics)Open setTheoryNormal (geometry)Centralizer and normalizerDataflowPhysical lawLecture/Conference
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
Thank you very much.
In 1996, U.S. Congress discussed the first wave of serious legislation of the internet. As a response, John Perry Barlow wrote his declaration of the internet of independence
of the cyberspace. In his accompanying letter, he derided legislator, well, fuck them were the words he had for them. As we now know, the reary giants, as he called them, have struck back. Traditional national security institutions all over the world, but mainly in the UK
and the U.S., have owned the internet. At the recent Black Hat conference, the Pony Awards and the category Epic Ownage were deservedly given to the NSA.
The idea of cyber independence has once and for all been crashed, crushed by realities. Students of international relations are too familiar with this problem and this constellation.
How do you protect legitimate security interests without endangering humanist values? How do you balance ideals and reality? In the late 18th century, philosopher Immanuel Kant was among the first to discuss globalization
and the appropriate design of political institutions. His goal was to solve the problem of war and peace on a global scale and Kant called it as a solution called for cosmopolitanism, a global civic society.
Truly cosmopolitan institutions, what he thought and global culture would help unfold reason on the global scale and help unfold human ingenuity in the forms of proper political
institutions. Cosmopolitanism, he thought, represented reason. But then realpolitik kicks in the real world, nationalism, war, intrigues, grand strategies, all these things, and reason no longer seems to be viable.
As a theorist and thinker in imperfect worlds, you have two options. You can either develop ideas that are viable, still somewhat attractive but clearly lack
normative ambition. The second option is you develop ideas that are truly ambitious but clearly lack any chance of realizability. You can observe this mechanism in the development of one world thinking.
One world thinking re-emerged in the mid 19th century, end of 19th century, when there clearly was no one world, there were wars all over the world.
There was the ambitious goal combined with this one world ideas to end the war plagued area of the late 19th and early 20th century. It resulted in imperfect political institutions on a global scale, the imperfect League of
Nations, the imperfect United Nations and a bunch of other global institutions. But cosmopolitan global unity has been unrealistic both before and after World War II. The idea of cosmopolitan global unity has never become real.
So the option you have as a theorist and analyst of the political sphere is to either support these imperfect United Nations models and other global institutions, military alliances
or become kind of a hippie supporting unrealistic ideas of global one world hugging.
The Internet's promise has been to foster civic ideas on a global scale, has been a cosmopolitan idea of global conversation, of a common platform for deliberation for
global discussions among equal citizens. And one of the most appealing promises related to the Internet has been the rise, the emergence, the build of ideas and theories and practices of open source and peer production.
These ideas would lead to or democratize our societies in various ways, in tremendous ways and it might even lead to a democratization of global security institutions, of institutions
to produce security for societies. The defining characteristics if you look at these open source and peer production models, the defining characteristics are distributiveness, openness and socialness. They are distributed in so far that there is no dominating center, no central authority,
no legally binding entity that imposes its will. They are open in so far as you can access these production platforms. They are not access control. You can use the output of these production platforms and they are social in so far as
you can contribute to them, if you will, at your own will, without being forced to by law or any kind of pecuniary incentives. So it's distributed, open and social. Those were the ideas of the Internet.
But now Internet Realpolitik has kicked in and Internet governance no longer is open because Internet security governance is not open. The governance of Internet security is in the hands of institutions that are closed,
centralized, hierarchical. But yeah, you could still call the Internet open if you want to. Certainly it is still open. It is open like a shopping mall. You can come in, you'll be monitored. Every move you make, every breath you take there.
So we have a new reality. It will not go away. Theories, norms and the whole storytelling of the Internet probably need to be adapted. You could call this, and political theorist Emanuele Richter called it,
the reason-reality funnel. You have reason on the one end. I shouldn't have the microphone on the other. You have reality on the other. The idea is with ideals that they influence the reality.
But reality also influences ideals. And you hope that ambitious ideals influence the reality. So in a way the title of my talk, End, which contains end of one Internet,
in a sense it is wrong. It is not the end of one Internet. It will certainly be reborn, the concept, but it is a stripped-down version adapted to the realities with less normative ambition.
There are lots of discussions about Internet security. But there is one way we should not respond to these discussions, by denying the need for it. There is no point in decrying the necessity on debates on security.
There is a need, clearly a need and a necessity for security and therefore its institutions. So if you want a reason for this, look no further than Emanuele Kant. With dark humor he described the character of the human species. He called them a group of persons that can't do without peaceful togetherness
and yet can't help but constantly love one another. So basically he said, we need each other, but I just can't stand seeing your faces all the time
and this kind of thing needs to trouble eventually, occasionally in politics. So, as I said, we clearly need Internet security institutions, we need security institutions and we need to discuss them.
Our traditional security institutions are hidden, secretive, bureaucratic, centralized. There are reasons why they are like this. But now we have entered a new domain, they have entered a new domain, they are protecting a pervasive global communication infrastructure. We need to understand different approaches to security
and different kinds of security institutions and approaches that could solve this problem. So we need to understand them and to come up with new designs probably.
So the remainder of this talk I'm going to give a quick, a rough sketch of the models of security productions, models that are in place or proposed. It's a complex debate and it's only a brief appetizer I can give here. So let's look at three forms of security production.
Information hegemony, feudal security and the so-called fire brigade model. Robert Kahn, one of the designers of the TCP IP protocol,
said in the 1970s, quote, there would be no global control at the operational level, unquote. I think that's history. Robert Nye, who is a former senior defense and intelligence executive but foremost probably known as an influential thinker in the field of international relations
and his co-author, William Owens, proposed an information age successor to the nuclear umbrella. The nuclear umbrella served the U.S. in the times of the Cold War to both protect itself and its allies.
It helped, the nuclear umbrella helped to keep allies dependent on security services provided by the U.S. So Nye and Owens were looking for a successor for that back in 1996. Let us read the following quote.
I think it's seminal and we need to understand this. Nothing, I think, describes the status quo better than the following. So these capabilities, dominant consideration of knowledge, point to what might be called an information umbrella.
Like extended nuclear deterrence, they would form the foundation for a mutually beneficial relationship. The United States would provide situational awareness, particularly, but not exclusively, particularly regarding military matters of interest to other nations.
Other nations, because they could share this information about an event or crisis, would be more inclined to work with the United States. Just as nuclear dominance was the key to coalition leadership in the old era, information dominance will be the key in the information age.
It shows two things. First, the NSA GCHQ-5-9-14I's dragnet has been envisaged almost 20 years ago. Second, it nicely describes the essence of hegemony
and the relation between the hegemonic leader and its followers in hegemonic consolations. And this kind of security clearly is not distributed open and social, but it is here to stay.
The second model of security production that has been frequently mentioned is feudal security. Bruce Schneier has written a bit about it, and he wanted to find a term to describe the relation between internet giants
who protect us from viruses, malware, online extortion, and so forth. So he turned to medieval Europe, and let me quote him, in medieval Europe, people would pledge their allegiance to feudal lords for that lord's protection.
So translated to our world, this reads, hey Google, Apple, Facebook, I trust you, you should trust me, and I'm nice, I play to your rules, you can trust me, but please do protect me, and that's the deal we should have, shouldn't we? So for me as a medievalist, it's a bit of a funny term,
feudal security, because feudalism for the underlings usually meant quite the opposite of security. Rather, security my ass.
And the third thing is the fire brigade. There have been calls for an internet fire brigade. The first time I read about it was a proposal by Jonathan Citrine in 2009, and suddenly we have heard Google VP, Vice President Vint Cerf
talked about it, I guess, since 2009, and he said that we would need a cyber security, cyber fire department to defend us from attacks. Turns out we have equivalents of fire brigades already,
we have a network of global certs, but more importantly there's a whole superset of global security communities consisting of technical staff, security expert, malware analysts. Citrine once called them the unsung heroes who perform random acts of kindness.
And this is an institutionalized network of communities, quite an interesting thing. And they perform much better in the sense of how distributed and open and social the production of security is.
But let's go back to this reason reality funnel. As I said, there are two alternatives when reality clashes with ideals. Say goodbye, or the first thing is say goodbye to your old ideals, the old norms of distributed, social and open, or continue to preach non-viable ideas
and become kind of a cyber, a hippie cyber tree hugger. But there's a third alternative, at the ante, and think deep and hard and long about how distributiveness, openness and socialness of internet security institutions could be increased.
I guess it's pretty complicated, it's a long-term thing and there are tons of hindrances, and it might most likely not be feasible. But there's still this thing, the memory of the former liberty.
Machiavelli knew that inhabitants of republics, of conquered cities and territories that once enjoyed freedom would not be able to let go of their memories of the past. He wrote, but in republics there is more vitality, greater hatred
and more desire for vengeance, which will never permit them to allow the memory of their former liberty to rest. Machiavelli proposed his beloved prince two options to deal with such a conquered territory.
The safest way is to destroy them or to reside there. And I think you, the internet community, will be visited soon. Thank you.
Thank you very much for this enlightening and inspiring talk. Now we have some time for questions from the audience. Are there any questions over there?
Thanks for the very interesting talk, especially for me as I operate an internet account named One World. My question, would you agree that the internet is some kind of a monopole,
like very expensive to build, cheap to operate, so there can be only one? Or would you say it will divert into multiple networks or something like that? Well, China has one, hasn't it? So we have two, kind of, a bit of.
Well, they have their monopolized services, their Twitter equivalent on top of internet services. Do you mean like almost disconnected? Yeah. Yeah. I think there will be one. In a way, yeah. Technically. Okay.
Are there any more questions to the talk? Well, I have a question. I mean, it's a really interesting situation,
or image of the situation that you paint here right now. But like what could we do except thinking about those images right now at this very moment? Would you have ideas? I don't know. I mean, you were talking at the end of the talk about new concepts to think about and there were some on your presentation.
It is hard to come up with ideas, with viable ideas, with viable security institutions that still support these former ideals of distributed open social in a coherent way
because you have in the security domain these things like power gambles, the need for secrecy because there are some evil antagonists and these are fundamental hindrances to these ideals of openness and the other ones.
And this is hard stuff to think about and it takes a long time to come up with ideas and it's not a one main show. It is a challenge for our society, I think.
Okay. Thank you. I think our time is up. Thank you again for your inspiring talk. Let us all think about those new concepts. I think it's up on us and applause, please, for the end.