The Digital Future Is About Disintegration

What until recently for many in the West defined a country, its borders, language, culture, climate, education, politics, social engagement and national legal systems are now beginning to fuse in cyberspace. 

This is all being dispersed across electronic systems powered by digital technology. challenging what many people consider are the historic traditional barriers and  groups are trying to create some new ones. 

Electronic inter-connection is changing the way some people consider their nationality and citizenship. For others, where important issues divide society, cyber connectivity is increasing their radicalisation and making them want the social changes to happen faster and some would say now in news/blog time.

Similar to earlier and other historical technological changes all of these movements are happening far quicker than most traditional governments and organisation’s structures can deal with. 

And certain societies cultures also find some of these changes unacceptable as with the US National Security Agency (NSA) revelations concerning their new methods of data collection. The NSA has been implanting new software and computer surveillance techniques to intercept and collect secret data in different parts of America and overseas. 

Much of this is being discussed and challenged within the constant cyberspace connection and engagement often through social media and Internet discussions set off by Whistleblowers like Assange and Snowden.

Yet for current governments just over a decade ago cyber security was not considered a pressing priority. Fourteen years ago the only real areas of apparent electronic concern were for government, corporate and military computer networks and whether they would survive the millennium number change. At that time only a few, mainly western intelligence agencies and small parts of the military or commerce were processing and protecting electronic sensitive or intelligence material that was mission critical. These networks were physically and electronically walled off to a reasonable extent such that any unauthorised access could be stopped and monitored and the actual number of electronic attack incidents was very low. 

But 9/11 effects on the changes to intelligence that came soon after, both in the US and connected western countries, altered the data access boarders radically and allowed cross department and cross organisational access as never before as at the same time social networking was on the rise. 

Today, the cyber threat is not only a concern for government and the military but also for commercial organisations and individuals. The attacks on infrastructure and the requirement to counter such cyber-attacks has recently become far more pressing and continuous.  Now with the theft of everything from stored data, government intelligence to medical knowledge and commercial patents the imperative to protect has become increasingly important.

Cyber-attacks in the UK are costing commerce over 26 billion pounds annually and with the recent economic pressures and breakdowns hackers have been employed by governments for attack, propaganda and intelligence and by criminals to find new ways of stealing. 

From a personal perspective during the next decade we will be far more deeply and electronically engage with individuals and organisations from across the world in all areas of our life, personally, commercially and certainly politically. This is partly because in the next ten years the planet’s interconnected Internet population will electronically grow using mobile devices from 4.39 to 7.6 billion Cyber technology will become more specific to us as individuals such that even some of our thought processes will begin to alter, as our short and longer-term thinking is affected by what we currently, and in future will expect from our electronic memory systems.

Our engagement with robotics and such elements as wearable computers that can monitor human health and help to improve our memory and decision processes are no longer science fiction and a little later we will discuss some of these new innovation in more detail. 

As these new electronic consciousness systems will increasingly offer individuals new information, analysis and decisions to maintain and grow our memory, personal plans, commercial and political strategies for our future development.
Western individuals are currently continually using electronic cyber systems that link and interconnect them with the Internet, mobiles and social networks. These days around 84% of the EU population use the Internet daily. 
In the coming decade instant access to knowledge and the efficiency of the Web will be applied more broadly and where the physical and digital worlds blend. 

Cyberspace is a core element of today’s global information space, more commonly known as the ‘cloud’ or the ‘big data’ age. More importantly, the preponderance has spill over effects on the effectiveness and efficiency of the more ‘traditional’ commons: land, sea and air. Information technologies and space communication systems allow, inter alia, for more efficient land, sea and air activities via GPS and other geographic location systems.

We have therefore seen a global increase in ‘hacktivism’. Hacktivists seek to gain control over computer systems or websites to manipulate them to promote a cause, make a political statement or disrupt services, for example, by overloading websites with botnet attacks, which can deny or prevent the legitimate use of the service.

Cyber-attacks in general are becoming more advanced and sophisticated. Incidents reported internationally suggest that attacks are increasingly targeted at intellectual property and other proprietary information held by businesses, as well as at individuals. 

On a geo-political level some of the most advanced and persistent cyber-attacks on governments and critical infrastructure worldwide are thought to originate from foreign military and intelligence services or organised criminal groups. 
One of the systems being used is called Tor, which is free software for enabling online anonymity. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer network consisting of more than three thousand relays to conceal a user's location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. 

Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity and is intended to protect the personal privacy of users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential business by keeping their internet activities from being monitored. The traffic is also encrypted and re-encrypted multiple times, making it very difficult for police and other authorities to trace. However, 'Dark-Net' services such as Tor are also used by its supports for many legitimate purposes. 

Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity, including visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms, back to the user and is intended to protect the personal privacy of users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential business by keeping their internet activities from being monitored.

For example, some journalists and whistle-blowers use them to communicate with each other. However, Tor is also used to spread pornography and images of child abuse, as well as to sell drugs via sites such as Silk Road. Silk Road operates as a Tor hidden service, such that online users are able to browse it anonymously and securely without potential traffic monitoring. Silk Road is an underground website, sometimes called the "Amazon.com of illegal drugs" or the "eBay for drugs"garnering over $1.2 billion in drug sales in three years of operation.

Social media is a massive technological and social phenomenon, but its power as a business tool is still being discovered. 

Never before has a communications medium been adopted as quickly or as widely as social media. It took commercial television 13 years to reach 50 million households and the initial Internet service providers just over three years to sign 50 million users, however, it took Facebook just a year and Twitter just under 9 months to reach the same milestone.

Alfred Rolington is Co-founder of Cyber Security Intelligence and a noted expert on Cyber Security and Intelligence.

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