Creating Post-Modern Intelligence
We are in a Cyber Revolution that is changing society, geo-politics, crime and conflict. The development has been called a Cyber Innovation or Web 0.3, but is probably best described as the 4th Industrial Revolution and will be a Digital Shock for most people. The very nature of the Internet creates global collaboration that is changing the way in which we view social connections and national borders.
Now the modern globalised society is increasingly dependent on an array of organised and sometimes randomly interrelated electronic infrastructures.
This transformation is happening far faster than previous industrial revolutions and the changes began as a form of Information Technology (IT) but this revolution is now developing and employing a range of emerging electronic technologies.
This new 4th Revolution is characterised by a fusion of technologies such as new methods of 3D commercial production, data driven vehicles, robotic, bio-technology and new criminal activity and there is a blurring of physical, digital and biological elements to create a new techno-reality.
Few Areas Of Our Lives Remain Untouched By The Digital Revolution
Across the world there are now nearly 4.5 billion Internet users and over five billion mobile phone connections; every day, we send about 300 billion emails. This revolutionary change has been called the Cyber Innovation or Web 0.3, but is probably best described as the 4th Industrial Revolution and is an increasing Digital Shock for most people. The transformation is happening far faster than previous industrial revolutions and the changes are coming as Information Technology and AI et al is developing and employing emerging computing technologies.
This process will change everything, with examples such as new methods of commercial production, to data driven vehicles to specific individual identity recognition.
More importantly, it changes us as individuals and will gradually make many of us more physically robotic and AI and bio-technology will help to improve our metal abilities. From 2000 to 2020, the number of global Internet users rose from 394 million to 4.4 billion which nearly 57% of the 7.7 billion global population. Today there are over one billion Google searches every day and two billion videos viewed daily on YouTube. The average user spends 2.5 hours a day online.
The next phase of business web/cyber innovation is the ability to collect, deeply analyse and commercial process global data.
The positive effects have been incredible, connections and info gathering but, control and influence of the message by governments and commercial organisations throughout the centuries was relatively straight forward and this process created a production line model for the way organisations were and still are structured.
Background
Many people think that the Internet and the world wide web are the same thing. While they are closely linked, they are very different systems. The internet is a huge network of computers all connected together. The Internet is infrastructure while the Web is service on top of that infrastructure. Currently, the Internet is a global interconnecting electronic system of about 52 billion computers. networks, which includes the World Wide Web. The Web is the part of the Internet that search engines like Google search.
Deep Web However, the Web also includes the Deep Web which much larger than the searchable Web includes many sites and data that is non-accessible to Google type searches as it has publicly non-accessible parts of business, university data and secret and private aspects of government data. It is difficult to judge how large the Deep Web actually is but it is certainly much larger that the surface Web and many experts believe it to be four or five hundred times larger than the surface Web.
Within the Deep Web however there is a small area known as the Dark Web and this is really the Red Light District.
Searching the Dark Web And so to give this electronic information scape a picture one can imagine that the Internet is an interlinked country with large cities, towns and villages as well as closed farming and woodlands. Now deeper into the cities and some larger towns there are red-light districts where the criminals have hideouts, clubs, brothels and hidden drug shops. This aspect of the Web is the Dark Web which houses the criminal economy which is growing and will affect more aspects of the legal Internet. This is now where one can buy drugs, review porn pictures, prostitution connections, buy passports and weapons, also there are stolen libraries of books, films and videos for sale.
The Dark Web can be accessed by using search engines like Tor. The Dark Web was actually created by the US government to allow spies to exchange information completely anonymously. US military researchers developed the technology, known as Tor (The Onion Router) in the mid-1990s and released it into the public domain for everyone to use.
The Dark Web is used by criminals but it is also used by people like journalists, people who want to stop corporate and government surveillance of their activity on the Web. A lot of these users are not interested in criminal behavior, but just have a preference for their privacy from government or business monitoring and surveillance.
When you log on to a Dark Web site, you quickly notice that there are no pop-up ads following you from website to website.
What you will often see is sites that the criminals host which claim to be very reliable because they also have user ratings. The idea is that if a particular criminal isn’t reliable, their reliability assessment significantly declines. So the marketplace, illegal as it might be, is apparently self-regulating. However, the Dark Web is being used by terrorists to gain members, to hide their activities and re-organise themselves.
Fundamentally, the Dark Web is encompassed of small peer-to-peer networks and dark web networks like Tor, I2P and Freenet.
The Dark Web is growing and will certainly change the Internet. From a criminal angle this area of the web is very commercially successful and they use it not only to sell illegal products and items but also to understand who to criminally target and steal from their accounts.
What is Available on The Dark Web? Ulbricht, formerly known as Dread Pirate Roberts, founder of the Silk Road Dark Web online market, was convicted in 2015 on charges of money laundering, conspiracy, drug and hacking-related charges.
However, the Dark Web remains incredibly attractive to Internet users for a wide range of reasons. The enshrouded nature and complex methodology required to access this world have effectively made it a secret world, full of salacious activity, black markets, sights, and perks limited to a select few.
Cyberwarfare There is often little difference in offensive cyber capabilities between criminal groups and some military forces.
Hacking tools are becoming more accessible. In 2017, the US National Security Agency’s sophisticated offensive suite was stolen or leaked and subsequently used in attacks. Cyber warfare has reached a new phase this year and the re has been increased levels of integration between the physical and cyber domains, cyber warfare as an interchangeable battlefield tool, an attack in one domain and retaliation in another. The catalyst has been the Middle East, the continuing escalation of tensions between the US and its allies and Iran.
Role of Military in Cyber Security Cyber warfare can present a multitude of threats towards a nation. At the most basic level, cyberattacks can be used to support traditional warfare. For example, tampering with the operation of air defences via cyber means in order to facilitate an air attack. A decade ago in mid-July 2010, security experts discovered a malicious software program called Stuxnet that had infiltrated factory computers and had spread to plants around the world. It is considered the first attack on critical industrial infrastructure that sits at the foundation of modern economies.
Stuxnet, while extremely effective in delaying Iran's nuclear program for the development of nuclear weaponry, came at a high cost. For the first time, it became clear that not only could cyber weapons be defensive but they could be offensive.
The large decentralisation and scale of cyberspace makes it extremely difficult to direct from a policy perspective. Non-state actors can play as large a part in the cyberwar space as state actors, which leads into dangerous, sometimes disastrous, consequences.
Small groups of highly skilled malware developers are able to as effectively impact global politics and cyber warfare as large governmental agencies. A major aspect of this ability lies in the willingness of these groups to share their exploits and developments on the web as a form of arms proliferation. This allows lesser hackers to become more proficient in creating the large scale attacks that once only a small handful were skillful enough to manage.
Current Cyber
The Internet has breathed new life into networked activity and broadened the impact of anarchist post-modern data and thought. This is permitting communications and coordination without the need for central source command. And it is facilitating coordinated actions with minimal resources and bureaucracy These opportunities and threats pose serious questions about the way in which current Intelligence and commercial organisation are structured and operate.
Government and commercial organisations, like all business structures, are built to fit certain times. With the effects of Globalisation governments and organisations need reorganising and strategy and tactical methods need rethinking. And this process must continue from geo-market analysis.The Intelligence Cycle uses Rationalism: task, collect the data, make an assessment, write the analysis and deliver/publish the intelligence. This is only one method of producing intelligence and we should continue to use a rationalistic approach.
Other processes could be non-linear and includes more of a dialogue between specialists and generalists. It is more interactive and discursive.This has ramification: everything from office layout, meetings, to editorial systems/practice. And the connectivity of content and improved service.
In a global electronic environment pattern recognition has become as important as linear analysis.
As analysis and consultants we have to be aware of the new client requirements for actionable Intelligence that will measurably save them people, time and money. We must understand where our cultural bias lies and what effect this has on our final analysis. Organisations are built to fit certain times. They need refreshing and rethinking. News and analysis keeps the client aware. Linear Intelligence process fits a settled and culturally understandable situation.
Scenario and Mosaic changes our thinking and brings new ideas of strategy.
Mosaic Method Created by Information thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and writers like Robert D. Kaplan and Alfred Rolington. Mosaic means building a world that you wish to investigate from the oppositions own views of history, imagery, graffiti, popular culture through to its boundaries, prejudices, cultural conventions, social economics, national and local politics and the views of foreign governments and the personalities involved. Useful as a means towards new perspectives on a problem and a method that works along-side others.From a government, intelligence agency and border policing perspective the strategy required to deal with CyberSpace has some historic similarities to the way in which oceans were used by nations and groups for inter-national exploration, research, trade, military and naval attacks and piracy.
The oceans have similarities in this model to the current Internet and the Web is similar to trade routes and the piracy, which was used on the trade routes as hacking is now used on the Web and across different aspects of the Internet. Piracy was also used by governments, who often called it privateering, as well as by groups of independent pirates.
Piracy was gradually contained and finally internationally significantly reduced, but this process took a very long time.
It required government agreements, extensive intelligence analysis and naval engagement before the reduction of piracy was achieved.
These extended processes took centuries to accomplish any real success, but finally significant aspects of it were outlawed by the Peace of Westphalia and put into international treaties by the Declaration of Paris in 1856. In the 20th century, when the invention of aeroplanes changed many national views on international air space, it came to governments and corporates to review and legalise international flights.
The process of agreements on across border flights, although sometimes difficult was far more effective and faster as a process than the time shipping and piracy agreements had taken. A similar type of process is needed by current governments to achieve Cyber agreements and to reduce the costs of Cyber-crime. Not only did these historic agreements alter commerce and international trade economics, they also changed the ways in which secret intelligence organisations operated in the new environment.
We have gone, in a relatively short space of time, from senior politicians and ministers of state saying that government’s don’t read a ‘Gentlemen’s mail’, to Snowden’s ‘revelations’ that government’s do occasionally review your social network profile, and they do occasionally read your email. Yet of course openly they have claimed that they don’t.
Like All Revolutions, This One Is Disruptive.
Digital technology has already rocked the media and retailing industries, just as cotton mills crushed hand looms and the Model T put farriers out of work. Many people will look at the factories of the future and shudder. They will not be full of grimy machines manned by men in oily overalls. The new factory focuses on mass customisation. Producing objects that specifically relates to particular buyer’s requirements and this is already taking place with some current production systems in Germany with Siemens.
Now the Digital Revolution representing the new Information Age signifying a radical change from mechanical, analog and into the digital technology cyberspace and its fundamental characteristics have changed dramatically over 30 years. Today the concept of cyber is used to describe the systems and services directly or indirectly connected to the Internet, telecommunications, electronic, and computer networks.
Cyberspace can be visualised as an electronic nervous system running through many national and international sectors and systems.
Digital technology which has already significantly rocked the media and publishing industry. Publishing has been completely changed by digital technology and has allowed readers a far faster electronic engagement with issues, news and analysis.
It has threatened the commerciality of newspapers, books and magazines and considerably reduced the amount of overall print. The new process has given far more individuals a growing blogging space in which to add real and false news, comment and views globally. With the face of the publishing industry set to change, it is digital technologies that emerge as one of the defining factors for future business.
Computer technology to create, sort and deliver electronic content that will engage and prove useful for the recipient is among the most important trends for the publishing industry between now and 2020 according to a recent study by Smithers Pira. For television broadcasters the time-shifting function of watching a recorded programme means it is easy to skip advertisements. Advertisers are trying to develop alternative methods of delivering their message, some overt and some covert, using product placement and ambush advertising.
Smaller, more powerful mobile gadgets catch the public attention and there are armies of content providers broadening the range of applications for consumers. They represent a new and rapidly changing media challenge for publishers: how to supplement and earn revenue from these communication channels.
However, as in all revolutions has a criminal down side and this needs all of our engaging attention.
Alfred Rolington is Co - Founder and CEO of Cyber Security Intelligence
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