Hey, everyone.
Just wanted to let you know about our new video on cybersecurity.
We got to check out a cybersecurity control center, so that's where they screen for massive
worldwide cyber attacks.
We also got to speak to a bunch of hackers, and actually see a hack happen live.
But before we get into that, we wanted to share some of our previous videos on cybersecurity
from some experts in the field.
So this episode originally aired on August 18, 2016.
Hope you enjoy, and remember to also check at RealVision.com to watch the new season
of Discoveries, where we dive into the implications of the internet of things.
That's everything from smart thermostats to internet connected cars and Wi-Fi coffee makers.
It's definitely something you don't want to miss.
So make sure to sign up for your 14 day free trial.
I was a foreign editor in the New York Times Magazine and then I've been an oped editor
there as well.
But I really started in college and really came up through alternative journalism, which,
whatever else might say about The New York Times, it's not really alternative journalism.
But I was at the Village Voice for like 12 years and it was all deeply anti-authoritarian
and mostly cultural, sort of, rather than political.
So needless to say, we didn't draw much of a distinction between those two in alternative
journalism.
But that's really what where I came from.
And my interests were divided between more cultural things like novels and film and that
kind of thing.
And then foreign cultures, but foreign politics and foreign affairs.
And so I just kind of stuck with those two.
And those were really my guide posts.
Once I had children I needed to make an actual living.
So I resisted full time work up until my first child was born.
When I was well into my 30s.
And that was when I went to the Times, actually.
But prior to that, I pretty much never had a full time job, except maybe for a couple
of months.
And I'd save my money and then I would go overseas once I saved up enough and I had
some story in mind.
So the first big overseas story I did was in 1984.
I was fascinated by the coal miner strike in the UK.
And so I spent several months running around to coal mines and talking with miners and
then with Mrs. Thatcher and Peter Healthfield and different people who were in the union.
Ian McGregor, who was sort of the point person for the government.
He was the head of National Coal Board, is that right?
So that was really my introduction to being a foreign correspondent.
And for years and years I just kind of arranged my life so I could go back to New York and
edit.
And I was in essentially a kind of a left wing counter cultural world.
And then when I had enough money I'd go off.
So I worked in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Eventually in the Middle East, Central Asia, across most of Europe.
North America, Canada.
Eventually I got to China as well.
Eventually, I went into college.
I was always interested in writing and at that time in the late '70s and '80s, the only
way that you could hope to make a living at writing was to be a journalist.
And so I went into journalism with that in mind.
I went to the University of California at Berkeley because of its counter cultural heritage.
Its new daily newspaper-- student so-called newspaper-- was an independent corporation.
It was an off campus corporation because there had been a rebellion by it.
I think the paper was at that point almost 100 years old, which is pretty incredible
in itself.
But a few years before I got there, the staff had rebelled against the administration.
And so there was a battle over it.
And so they took all the typewriters and desks and then walked a few blocks down Dwight Way
and put them in a rented office, which is where I came into the picture.
So that's really where I learned to be a journalist.
And it hadn't been what I intended to do, but I really, really loved doing it.
And at that point, we still had-- partly because we didn't have very much money-- but we use
manual typewriters.
I think there might have been one or two electric ones.
We did each story-- when you wrote it, it was done on what's called a half sheet, which
is a piece of paper about that big.
Usually taken off of the roll from the AP machine.
And we would slice out these pages and then you put one paragraph on each page.
So then the editor would then look at it and say, no, this paragraph is more important.
And then there was like a physical re-stacking of the order the paragraphs.
So I learned to journalism in a very low tech or early tech way.
Slightly anachronistic, but not by much.
And I've basically seen both the profession change technologically and in many ways, go
downhill ever since.
And in fact, most industries that I get in seem to fall apart within a couple of years
of my getting involved with them.
And that was the case with journalism too.
It's been a long sad decline.
Which isn't to sound anti-technology at all.
In fact, I did some work with the Chairman of Google, for example.
And I recently wrote a book about technology.
And I've worked on helping journalism to adjust to changes in technology.
Nonetheless, I think there were a couple things that have really been lost in the course of
that trajectory.
The main thing really was it in the United States, and to a lesser degree in other countries--
very much also in Latin America-- journalism came up as an industry that was based with
a lot of different newspapers in different towns.
And each newspaper was quite distinct.
And in a kind of pre-globalized information situation, each of those became powerful.
They were essentially monopolies.
Even if there was a morning or an evening paper, they were just sharing a monopoly.
And so first of all, if it had that kind of political power and significance, which brought
with it a sense of responsibility.
Local responsibility.
And local responsibility is, obviously, very different from the kind of diffused responsibility
you get in the internet period.
You're immediately answerable to people whom you know and who know you.
It's a different kind of responsibility.
. And then secondly, because literacy was not
a secret, it was hardly even a skill actually-- there was no professional journalism.
And there's barely a professional journalism now.
It sort of became professionalized, I think, largely at the instigation of universities,
who saw a kind of additional source of revenue that would be possible.
But basically, the brilliance to me of journalism, in that kind of political economic sense was
that someone like me, who came from a very modest background, who only had a bachelor's
degree and had to really struggle to get that, could succeed in it through work.
And yet it was a relatively esteemed profession.
Not like a doctor or a lawyer, but nonetheless, not like a landscape laborer, which I have
also been.
Or a construction site worker, which I've also been.
So journalism had this intense appeal in terms of social mobility among other things.
But it was generally in the US and elsewhere organized as an industry.
And so there's a great deal of on the job training.
I mean, it was never really seen as a profession, but it was seen as a kind of pretty intensely
trained vocation.
And that appealed to me a lot.
The social fluidity of it.
And that pretty intense sense of responsibility.
But also a certain rashness as well, which is very appealing, up to a point
Part of the way you get trained in it was through its own culture and through the responsibility
to other people within the profession.
I never thought of it as a profession, quite.
But anyway, in practice, you are answerable to the other practitioners.
And you built a reputation.
A good reputation or a bad reputation.
And then you sort of lived on that.
And that appealed to me.
That's what made it open to social mobility-- is that you had a chance to live on a reputation.
And I think that structure has really broken down.
There's a lot of good journalism that goes on now.
I find that in the sort of the more traditional media setups, the pressures are so great to
generate so much content in a short period of time.
That, with some exceptions, kind of overwhelms the practice.
And I know it's a huge frustration for people who are in it.
Somebody who used to spend a couple of days working on a story now has to deliver something
every few hours.
And it's not that they couldn't do it, so to speak, in the old way.
But they don't get the opportunity to do it in the old way.
What sort of fills in, to some extent, for that is you do still have real talent kind
of coming up.
And it shapes itself more than the industry shapes it now.
So there's a different kind of personality that thrives in a situation like that.
But some of them are really great.
They tend to be-- not so much today-- not so much in any kind of general media.
They tend to be on sites that are devoted more to a particular topic.
Like things that I'm very interested in are cyber security, foreign affairs generally,
but in a particular, parts of the world and everything.
American foreign policy.
But some of the best stuff that I read on American foreign policy is on websites like
this one called War on the Rocks that most people wouldn't have heard of.
And that don't get marketed particularly.
And US Policy Defense One is another site.
There are these sites for pretty much whatever you're interested in.
But it's a very, very different journalistic world.
And in some ways, it's barely journalism.
But the quality level tends to vary quite a bit, even within a quality site.
I think it's been difficult for journalism and investigative journalism to deal with
the Great Recession-- the period after it-- for several reasons.
One is that traditionally, there's been such a distinction drawn between the business press
or the financial press and the rest of the press.
And the business world tends to listen to the financial press or the business press
and not to the rest of it.
And so the non-business press, so to speak, approaches those sorts of issues, particularly
on that scale, a global scale-- tends to approach them in a way that very rarely gets at the
essential dynamics.
Because the people in the non-business press world aren't really accustomed to thinking
about those things.
So they'll tend to put them, for example, as Michael Lewis did, into a more, what is
sort of fundamentally a magazine journalism frame.
His work is really great but there was a lot else going on in 2008.
Or there's a kind of moral frame that comes naturally to non-business people when they're
thinking about business.
To me, judgment is probably more inappropriate than appropriate.
Which isn't to say that there isn't a good, sort of morally driven in some way or ethically
driven journalism done about business issues and economic issues.
But it does tend to close off the avenues that you would go down to investigate those
issues.
Because you have a moral point in mind already, probably.
So that stuff is really surprisingly difficult to write about.
And because the Great Recession had such an international quality to it-- the press is
still local in the sense that the French press is demonstrably different from the German
press.
And they're both demonstrably different from the American press.
And so early on in the Great Recession, there were several institution, states, people who
were seen as the possible likely people to blame.
Or institutions to blame.
And the press treatment of the Great Recession quickly started to break down along those
lines.
Did it originate in the United States.
Did it have to do with savings.
Did it have to do with Chinese surpluses.
And these issues.
So I think that kind of derailed a lot of that discussion.
Because it's very hard to be at both an investigative person and 30,000 feet.
It's very difficult to combine those.
Particularly at the time, there was sort of, in a way, more blame to go around than possibly
that could have been assigned.
And I think that made writing about and investigating that quite a bit more difficult than you might
think at first blush.
One of the processes that I've witnessed in looking at journalism over the last 30 years
is the rise of a kind of highly politically opinionated journalism to a point where it
could really shift things.
Now that was not so much of a novelty as we sometimes think.
I mean, the golden age of establishment journalism when you listen respectfully to whomever,
I think, is a bit of a myth constructed in retrospect.
And it's interesting to think about why it would have been constructed in these different
times.
At least with American journalism, if you're familiar with it, it tended to be very highly
partisan.
Pretty much up until the Second World War.
And a lot of the sort of model for very high minded civic journalism is really a post World
War Ii thing.
And I don't think it is a coincidence that it corresponds with a level of American felt
global responsibility, which had not pre-existed World War II, or even like 1943.
So it was a bit of a myth, which reached its apotheosis in the early '70s with the Watergate
case.
That said, there are bad myths and good myths.
And there are myths that make you work harder to do better things and there are myths that
make you not.
So it's an attractive myth and I think, probably, a useful one.
To me, the point when that started-- if I had to pick one-- to decline, it was really
with the rise of talk radio and in particular, the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the United States.
And tapping into a feeling that there was a sort of center liberal not ideology, maybe
conspiracy.
But a kind of chloroform that the mainstream media were applying to all debate.
And in the media world, Rush Limbaugh is sort of tip of the spear with that.
Newt Gingrich in the House was the political equivalent of that.
And this was a sort of fairly coherent movement.
It all predates the internet.
And it possibly doesn't have anything to do with it.
The way in which the internet kind of undermined that sort of really strong central authority
of the journalistic business, I think, was exacerbating existing trends.
And also, with the rise of cable TV, just the fact that you used to have three channels
when I was a kid.
And then you had 50.
And people could access it.
And it was all kind of crap at first and then it got better and better.
So the advent of somebody like John Oliver as a really important political elucidator
is the point where we're at now in a pretty long development where there's a style of
a highly opinionated and even quite sarcastic delivery of information.
And it tends to be built off of, from left to right, an idea that there's a kind of center
that is pretending to be wiser than it is.
Now having worked in that center myself, and if not in its heyday, then pretty close to
it.
I can say that yes, indeed, there was a kind of endemic smugness to that culture.
There was a lot about it that was great.
But you could hardly maintain that that kind of smugness wasn't there as well.
What I like about some of the more non-right wing people in that world is that they are--
and I think John Oliver is, I think, a good example-- coming out of Jon Stewart.
But Jon Stewart really didn't do this particularly.
He was just like a particularly well read and smart guy.
But the John Oliver show and some others actually really devote a fair amount of time to research.
And I think there's a kind of sense of social responsibility that sort of creeping in the
back door after essentially two decades of that really being in decline.
And so you know, we'll see you will see what the next stage is.
But I don't think it's just a downward slope at all.
It changes form.
Well, I mean I've gotten into this private intelligence work in kind of interesting way
with respect to the history of journalism.
Because there's now-- and generationally, this will disappear, but for this window of
time-- around the world, a network of people who went into journalism, were trained in
it to the degree that you get trained, and devoted to-- not to sound sentimental-- to
actually discovering the truth and the facts of a situation, who have a really hard time
making a living.
And what I do now when I work for investors who are trying to-- basically, I try to find
out if something that they're interested in putting money into-- a company, people-- if
those are what they represent themselves to be.
And if they're a bit more subtly, even if they are honest about who they are, are their
ambitions for themselves actually corresponding enough to reality.
And those are fundamentally things that journalists do all the time.
And often, when I need information from a place, I found that there's this kind of--
I call it the League of Ex-Journalists-- who all basically know each other and are sympathetic
to the fundamental plight of not being able to do quite what it was you wanted to do when
you were 20.
And so it's like an international network of people.
I mean, I can find somebody anywhere within-- well, so far it hasn't taken more than a few
phone calls to find somebody.
Because it's sort of a shared culture.
But as I say, it's a shared culture that I doubt will last very long.
But it's lasting right now.
It answers a need because the world of investors-- let's say in a pre-globalized era.
So let's say before 1990.
In the majority, you lived within a relatively circumscribed world.
You may deals on the basis of people who were known to you or known to your family.
There's a kind of degrees of separation thing.
But the number of people who were going into fresh markets that they didn't know and gaining
command of them and then making investments in them and having them do well and so on--
that was just really a negligible percentage of the people who were in the kind of investor
world, right?
So with globalization, you both had an opportunity to enter markets.
It was much easier to enter them than it would have been earlier.
You'd have more information about them.
Roots were created for the flow of money.
Money could be transferred so much more easily across borders.
Profits could be repatriated all that kind of stuff.
So capital became much more global.
And on the whole, that worked out pretty well.
I mean, you'd have these immense private capital flows to places that had not gotten them before
because it wouldn't have entered the minds of the people who were in control of the capital
to move them to the given place.
Anyway, that's making a very complicated story in a very brief.
But the point I'm trying to make is that investors and capital became globalized and they enjoyed
10, 15 years or so of it being relatively hard to make a mistake.
Relatively hard.
Not that people didn't lose lots of money.
But relatively hard to make a mistake.
And confidence was built because the sense was that there was a kind of gradual but steady
convergence of political structures and a kind of understood global culture, which can
be easily mocked.
But for people who wanted to move their money to new places in the hopes of greater returns,
it was kind of necessary.
It all kind of formed a confidence building thing.
And really, from 2007, 2008 on, that has gradually fallen apart.
And not all of it.
But some really significant elements.
At this point to maintain that the political structures, at least of the major states,
and the relationship between those structures and economic practices, legal practices, and
so on-- the sanctity of contract, blah, blah, blah, never be another nationalization again--
that would be foolish to think that now.
And maybe someday, every country will be a democracy.
But nobody actually believes that anymore.
Or that there will never be another nationalization.
All this kind of stuff.
So even the idea that there's a kind of, OK, not on democracy grounds, not on cultural
grounds, possibly not on moral grounds or international human rights grounds, but there's
still a kind of shared capitalist rules of the road pattern that we can all rely on.
Even that isn't really true anymore.
And so you have a generation now or maybe two of globally minded investors who came
up in a period when they thought things are in a certain direction.
Now, the returns that you can get here in the developed world are relatively low.
Just this week, if you wanted to fly to safety with your capital, you could go into German
bonds, and after 10 years of them basically storing your money, you get a little bit less
than that back.
So you have two things going on.
You have a class of global investors who are used to a certain rate of return.
I think it's achievable and feel that as they move around the globe, they should be able
to kind of find it.
But at the same time, you have all these systems falling apart actually made that possible.
So what I do in that context is find information in order to sort of recreate some of that
level of confidence which can't be taken for granted for the reasons that it had been taking
for granted for quite a while.
So what it usually amounts to is, on a given investment target, just really looking very
closely at the people.
The companies, but also very much the people.
What seems to me at least to really keep it stability in a period of instability is personal
relationships.
And so if you want to understand a group of companies-- why they might work-- you really
need to look at how the people in them work with each other.
It's very often family ties of one sort or another.
But it takes awhile, especially if you're looking at Saint Vincent and Grenadines, BVI,
all these different shell companies, it takes a lot of figure that out.
And then to put that in the context of a political, sometimes definitely an economic and commercial
situation.
Very frequently, also, a political situation.
You need to know how those people especially, but also the companies, fit into the larger
social context.
And it's not that hard to do, but it takes a fair amount of work.
And you need to know what you're doing.
And investors can't really do that themselves.
What they tend to do is they find a sector or companies or very often, individuals whom
they'll meet.
And they'll say, OK, this person I discussed it, this looks like a reasonable business,
they've done well in the past.
And then that's kind of it.
I don't want to actually move to Singapore or Ghana or Columbia or wherever and really
find out.
I just want to feel like I've got a shot at 10% rather than 1%.
So where I come in is trying to not just prevent mistakes, but create a kind of level of knowledge,
which is only aimed at creating a level of sound judgment, really, on the part of the
investor.
So it's all kind of the aspect of globalization and the relative deglobalization that we're
undergoing now, and [INAUDIBLE] the expectations of investors that were created in a somewhat
earlier period.
I think that investors have naturally focused on balance sheets and annual reports of financial
information and these sorts of disclosures and everything For good reason you can't you
can't ignore any of that.
But you also can't let it be a kind of token of stability.
You can't invest it with the power that it doesn't really have.
And any the company can do other things with balance sheets and you know and it's very
hard to know whether resources actually exist.
One of the things that we do it is fairly frequently misrepresented.
It's just like what are your actual assets.
And it's sort of like the equivalent of resume padding.
We've secured this magnificent property or whatever.
And there'll be a property, but it won't be that magnificent.
And one of the things that we do is send somebody to go look at a property.
It sounds simple but people don't expect you to actually do that.
It's just classic investigative-- it's sort of the binoculars counting the ship's kind
of thing.
But you learn you learn a lot that way.
The proliferation of information that's available relatively easily online has some interesting
benefits in terms of what we do.
And it can also be really misleading.
Some of the benefits are that you can get to know personalities.
Right now, and this will probably change, some people put a lot of information about
themselves still on the web and social media and sort of vaguely field that only their
friends will look at it.
And so you can find out a fair amount about people that they might prefer that you wouldn't
know that's of business relevance.
But it varies enormously.
And in some ways, I actually don't feel like there's that much of an information glut.
Partly because I just don't think there.
I think it's a bit overrated-- that there's you can find out all this information.
Secondly, if there's anything that somebody doesn't want you to know, the chances are
fairly high they'll go to some trouble to not make it available.
And so, in this sort of let's say relative information glut, the key thing if you're
trying to understand situation is not to be fooled into thinking that the information
that's in front of you is the information.
It's only the information in front you.
And so you go back to classic intelligence analytical work of trying to find patterns
of that, assuming that you know what they are and looking for correspondences without
imposing a pattern.
And letting the information kind of speak a little bit.
Because otherwise, you'll just be misled.
Maybe not deliberately, but it'll be as if it were deliberate.
I tend to break cyber security down and do a couple of different boxes.
Because at this point, there's so many different social actors-- I don't want to say exploiting--
for whom cyber security is a way to get some other goal, whether it's fear of one thing.
It's usually fear.
There's an enormous amount of fear marketing in the cyber security world.
And so from the perspective of some of that world, the more fear the better.
And their incentive is not to kind of break it down.
But I do you can really differentiate between several aspects of it.
There's the personal aspect, the social media aspect.
The pictures of you when you were 15, smoking a joint and throwing up that seemed so amusing
at the time and now you can't get a job.
That kind of thing.
And I think that sort of is taking care of itself over time in some interesting ways.
I think that, certainly for younger people-- and by younger I mean under 25, maybe-- at
this point there's a realization that who you are online is not your true self.
It's a constructed self.
Which, for someone of my age, is a little sad, because I can remember the point when
your online self was actually much truer than your real life self.
And that was, in many ways, the kind of deep exhilaration of the early web.
All the things that people assumed about you because they knew from the street and you
went to the same elementary school.
You have the idea in your mind that yes, that's all true, but the reason I'm like that is
because I resent something you did earlier-- two years before.
Whereas online, I'm going to be my kind of ideal, truest self.
And then people will flock to that self.
They'll make friends with that self.
Because inevitably, I'll be attractive, right?
Which is another wonderful delusion of the early internet days.
I think it's really, somewhat painfully, been reversed to where most people now think of
their online self as something that has to be somewhat circumscribed and kind of protected
or done temporarily.
One of the fascinating things is watching the last couple of generations come to the
realization online of what's perfectly obviously and traditional offline, which is that their
self when they are 10 is not their self when they are 13.
And when you're 10, you're very attached to your 10-year-old self.
You take it quite seriously and rightly so.
But no 10-year-old wants to think, I hope when I'm 14 I'll still be like me when I'm
10.
You have a sense of your development over time that you're going to change and that
you're going to change profoundly.
And that if you're not, something is actually quite wrong.
And so the process of growing up, you're used to shedding selves.
So we've had a couple of generations now who have kind of done that online.
And I think that the current generation of, let's say 14 to 15 year olds are aware that
these selves are temporary.
What the adult self is probably like the next shoe to fall in terms of how we define ourselves
online.
The next show to drop, rather.
But we'll see what shoe is like when it's dropped.
So people have become used to security practices.
They become used to keeping information off.
They become used to sort of curating their own public personalities, OK?
So that's one thing.
And that relates to other mundane but important cyber security stuff, like don't take a picture
of your credit card and put it on Facebook or things like that.
People used to do that.
So that's one category.
There's another category, which is cyber crime of the $100 million out of the bank in Bangladesh
via swift sort.
That might or might not become eased over in the coming years because the number of
criminal practices online-- while there is real innovation among hackers, a genuine innovation
among criminal hackers and noncriminal hackers in coming up with methods-- there are a couple
things to bear in mind.
The distributed denial of service attack, the famous DDoS, attack is pretty much like
an evergreen.
It's been going on.
It's like mace or the halberd or whatever-- the pike of cybercrime.
And it hasn't really changed much.
You just continue to do it.
And there have predictions of a cyber Pearl Harbor now for, I think, close to 25 years.
And yet the cyber Pearl Harbor never quite happens.
I mean, you don't want to give hostages to fortune.
But at the same time, it's not quite to the mysterious world of constant criminal innovation
that it's sometimes made out to be.
The other element in it, and we'll see if this happens or not, is the major states that
have online operations that are in a position to both identify and attribute responsibility
for this kind of thing when it's really sophisticated-- we kind of know what the states are.
And they're beginning really in the last year to talk seriously to each other about, despite
their differences, essentially gradually suppress truly criminal, stealing money kind of, selling
drugs kind of online activity.
Whether that cooperation really goes anywhere not is not really a money question.
It's really a political question.
And that brings me to the third box, which is the one that I'm a bit more specialized
in, which is the state power related cyber security box.
Like in the case of China for example.
But it everybody blames China and it's not entirely fair, but everyone picks on China,
really.
But any of the major states have had very sophisticated infiltration operations.
Some states are more likely to use that for purposes of what amounts to commercial espionage
than other states.
And this breaks down according to, more or less, traditional lines.
The French have always been famous for being willing to do commercial espionage on behalf
of French companies.
It predates the internet.
It's a cultural thing, I guess.
And certainly the Chinese have been very willing to do that.
That's not sustainable.
I mean it can't quite go on in that vein and states know this.
But it's hard for obvious reasons to separate a states' capacity to engage in political
espionage or aspects of cyber warfare, so to speak, which is another kind of abused
term.
And to be able to do what amounts to more commercial kind of crime.
And for the stability of the planet, it would be a good thing if ongoing efforts to separate
these boxes out so that the major states with the capacities to suppress crime can figure
out how to do it.
And they can bracket off those areas that are really more purely devoted to their competition
with each other.
Now that area of cyber security where states compete with each other and try to undermine
each other systems and try to create weapons that will enable them, in the event of conflict,
to prevail over enemy.
To make sure that their missiles don't hit their target.
To disrupt their command and control systems, which is what a lot of cyber warfare is really
devoted to.
That area is very concerning because it's not only not regulated, it's probably not
regulateable.
And my view is that different states recognize that situation but they are used to competing
with each other, essentially militarily.
And they don't know how to not do that.
And because the cyber sphere-- in terms of this kind of security-- involves weapons that
have had very few results, they, in a way, in and really imperfect and mostly misleading
metaphor, kind of resemble nuclear weapons in the sense of well, we all know we'll never
use them.
Except they're also the opposite.
Because they don't actually seem to do much of anything, the temptation is to use them
in a kind of experimental sort of way.
Which is basically what the major states do that with a lot of their cyber weaponry.
They just use it thinking that they won't need it.
But at some point they might need it if there's an actual conflict.
And it's a kind of form of arms race that's really need to cyber.
And nobody really knows where it works out.
My biggest worry is nobody really knows how to stop it.
The people in a position to make decisions about these things-- you can't know what your
enemies capabilities are.
And to be responsible, you should probably kind of assume the worst.
They do the same thing.
And there's no exit from that.
My additional great concern is that the stability of nuclear systems, strategic systems, is
coming.
Or at this point is coming and will depend much more on cyber systems, which kind of
control the weaponry and control defenses against attacks on the weaponry.
And so at that point, the logic of mutual assured destruction, which is so survivable,
second strike, and so on and therefore nothing will ever happen-- that will fall apart.
Both because the decision making windows will get so short.
And because by the time you can figure out what the other side's capabilities are, it's
kind of too late.
And therefore, you're going to be constantly trying to anticipate it.
So I really wish that the post-Cold War settlement had gone a little further along the road of
disarmament.
I mean it when a significant distance there, but the main countries still have stockpiles
that exceed the sort of destroyable part and therefore preserve this kind of second strike
capability.
All of which is theoretical.
But I really wish that all those weapons, before everything kind of went to hell, we
could have really reduced those stockpiles a lot more.
Because that's a true danger now.
Because the relationship between cyber and nuclear is very worrying.
it's not very well thought out.
My immediate reaction to the Snowden revelations was kind two fold.
Like a lot of people in my business, there was a sort of, well, you knew this kind of
thing was going on anyway.
And so don't get too wound up about it.
But it was the other reaction that really mattered more.
Which was it was now established as a kind of mutually recognized fact that this kind
of thing and had been going on and was likely to continue going on.
In other words, in the immediate aftermath of Snowden, there were denials and that sort
of thing.
But there was very little in the way of, yes, you're right, we need to rethink this on almost
anyone's part.
On Silicon Valley's part, there was an increasing anger, really.
I think there was a kind of feeling of betrayal, which maybe is partly a testament to the possibly
necessary level of naivety that you need in order to put in the hours and the effort and
the money to build companies the way that people do in Silicon Valley.
But they're basically been a kind of quiet agreement without any of the parties being
fully informed between the Valley and DC in terms of this kind of surveillance.
And with the GCHQ and some of the other players and the Five Eyes, the Commonwealth.
The kind of Anglo-Saxon world of intelligence sharing.
None of that relationship had been negotiated and it wasn't particularly transparent.
And the players didn't really know what they were doing.
So once Snowden exposed that from a Valley point of view, they though, oh my god, we
were actually kind of being used as tools here.
And we didn't realize that.
And that's certainly not how we envisioned ourselves and our role in the world.
Those to the degree that companies in the Valley want to be or are multinational or
international companies-- it raised it, and still does-- that kind of horrifying prospect
that their control over the security of their own systems would be, if not always compromised,
always potentially compromised, even by the US.
And that's attention that still is unresolved.
I mean the idea of building in back doors or redoing the code in iOS so that you can
get information off of the driver of a phone.
From a technical and from a Valley point of view, all this amounts to is making their
existing systems weaker and more vulnerable.
And at one level, that's inarguable.
It does make them more vulnerable.
And so all this was set in motion by Snowden.
And then the other thing that was set in motion by Snowden, in my view, is that the rest of
the world was like, oh, actually, these sort of sunny reassurances from either the big
US companies or the United States government or the British government-- that they would
kind of somehow just not do bad things really aren't worth very much.
And I mean it doesn't take a lot in most parts of the world to inspire a feeling of distrust
vis-a-vis American power, or vis-a-vis American-based multinationals.
And so that this was increased.
And this had, among other things, the effect of making other governments, at least larger
governments, feel like we need some protections here.
We need some protections for our possibly nascent IT sectors.
We need protections for our own command and control system so that our weapons continue
to work.
Maybe we don't want to only be using a system like GPS, which is still you administered
by the US Air Force and was a government project.
Maybe we don't want to have all of our commercial airliners dependent on that for their successful
functioning.
And so you have these other centers that are growing up, whether it's China and Russia
building their own GPS systems and trying to get their neighbors pulled into them.
It's laying your own cables.
All this kind of stuff, which on one view, if you look at the early days of the internet
and digital computing, you could say, well, the beauty of the internet is it's an open
system and anyone can come on to anyone could build onto it.
So why are we now having to build replicas of it.
And it's really almost entirely for political reasons.
And also for commercial reasons.
But I think mostly for political reasons.
And again, not to lay all this at Snowden, he was exposing some that existed.
But I really think it was a watershed moment in its different ways.
For the Valley.
For DC.
For China.
For Moscow.
For Delhi.
For all these different places.
Started in Brazil.
Started to reconfigure their view of what the internet and what this interconnected
world actually meant.
And to me, if, I were to pick one kind of line of development that I see now, it is
towards this kind of a Splinternet.
Where you're having sort of overlapping similar systems being constructed in order to preserve
certain kinds of political power.
To me, a very interesting development with this are these efforts by Facebook, Microsoft,
and Google to lay their own cable as companies.
Not as American companies, but simply as companies.
To build balloons and satellites that will be able to, essentially, if you put it all
together, it kind of amounts to an attempt to build a smaller, private, global internet.
Kind of like the internet of 15 years ago, that will not be subject to this kind of growing
sovereign restriction by nation states.
But I'm not sure that that's the solution either.
I mean, do you really want three or four companies to be the ones who control the non-subjective
state power internet.
I'm not sure that is necessarily the solution either.
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