Download - Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
1/21
Don't Worry We're From the Internets!Exploring the Tension Between Network and National Identities
April 29, 2009Richard NevinsProfessor Manuel CastellsCOMM 559 Globalization, Communication & SocietyAnnenberg School for Communication University of Southern California
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
2/21
Don't Worry We're From the Internets: The Tension Between Network and National Identities
I. Introduction
From its early beginnings as a network of just a handful of American research universities, the
internet has grown to become a massive, global network of networks that connects more than one
billion people around the world. While the costs and benefits of connecting so many people to the
internet will continue to be debated and examined, sometimes under-recognized is the achievement of
establishing and populating a network that connects so many users across geographies, national
boundaries and cultural and economic circumstances. Through accessing this globally interconnected
and interdependent network, internet users have been able to inhabit a space that is separate from the
everyday lived experiences of their 'real lives,' and construct network identities that represent them in a
virtual world. These network identities, empowered by a libertarian ethos injected into the code of
internet standards by many of the early developers of the network, are fluid, with users being able to
exert considerable control over the way that they are perceived by others through the careful
management of information disclosures and the positive association with existing social, cultural or
ethnic identities.
Considering the internet's global reach, these network identities present a challenge to the
traditional notion of national identity and sovereignty. The deterritorialized space of the internet
permits users to access foreign communities and information without physically crossing national
boundaries, and to participate with geographically dispersed affinity groups on the basis of shared
identity or mutual interest. Given that agents can engage in both benevolent and malevolent activities
on the network, the presence of a globally-diffused network identity appears to undermine the authority
of national governments, threaten their ability to manage and regulate the ways that citizens can access
information, and weaken the relevance of a shared national identity among compatriots on the internet.
The result is a less influential nation-state
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
3/21
Still, despite this rhetoric of virtualization and deterritorialization, the internet is a network that
relies on a specific physical infrastructure to operate, and an education in the necessary skills and
equipment needed to access it. The components of this infrastructure, from the server farms that deliver
information and the fiber-optic cables that literally connect nations across the oceans, to the end-user terminals that access the network, exist within the jurisdiction of national governments, or are managed
through international treaties and agreements that encourage nation-states to support each other's
sovereignty. This provides them with a means of asserting their presence and a degree of control on the
global network, and presents a palpable response to the notion of a post-national identity on the internet
that is free from the control of a duly-constituted national political and judicial authority. Additionally,
access to this network is regulated at least indirectly by telecommunications law and government
agencies like the Federal Communications Commission in the United States. Some nations, notably
China, institute far more overt and strict controls of internet access, and as we will see , even liberal
democracies are known to quash speech and commerce on the internet from time to time,
demonstrating that they are not entirely toothless.
What, then, is the balance of power between the national identity that has long served as the
primary organizing principle for international diplomacy, trade and culture, and this new network
identity? In this paper, I will analyze the nature of these network identities and examine how they come
into conflict with the interests and authority of national identities. Beginning with a brief investigation
of the establishment of internet protocols, I will explain how early decisions made by computer
programmers and hackers involved with developing internet standards and software have influenced
the separation of network identities from national identities. I will next consider how users have
themselves employed the openness and freedom inherent in the network to begin to widen the rift
between network and national identities. Finally, I will discuss how nation-states, aware of this
undermining of their authority, and under virtual siege from malicious actors, have attempted to
establish means of defending themselves and taking the fight to the cyber-warriors in an effort to
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
4/21
diminish the gulf that now separates national identities from network identities.
II. Encoding DeterritorializationThe network that is generally recognized as the precursor to the internet, the Defense
Department funded ARPANET, was a peculiar beast. Although it connected a number of research
universities and institutions, it had no central governing structure or organization. Indeed, at the outset
it did not even have common protocols to ensure that all of the relatively few users on the network
were able to share resources and information with each other. In an effort to establish standards for
ARPANET, the Network Working Group (NWG) was convened in 1968 by a group of researchers and
graduate students to address the various interoperability issues and other challenges that confronted the
network's operations (Abbate, 1999: 73).
The principle documents produced by the NWG (and later the IETF) were the Request for
Comment (RFC) series, wherein network engineers and computer scientists would submit proposals
and suggested solutions to address the growing pains of the ARPANET (Crocker, 2009). Following a
period of comment and suggestion, many RFC's became de facto standards applied across the network.
In RFC 3, founding NWG member Steve Crocker described the broad purpose of the RFC series as
providing documentation of any thought, suggestion, etc. related to the HOST software or other
aspect of the network. (Crocker, 1969) The informal nature of the RFC series (anybody could submit
an RFC, and 5,540 have been published in 40 years) reflected the openness and flexibility that the
NWG members intended to infuse into the network, and pains were typically taken to ensure
interoperability and openness on the network for the benefit of all users (Leiner et al, 2003).
This culture of sharing was common to much of computer programming as practiced in the
computer science departments of American universities. These communities sprang up from an
unlikely confluence of sources: academic computer scientists and hackers partnering with military
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
5/21
researchers and entrepreneurs (Castells, 2001: 37). Each group approached the same goal with different
motivations, but all of them contributed to both the creation of the networks that became the internet,
and the underlying ethos of redundancy, interoperability and freedom that still informs the network
today. The combination of federal funding via the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA), a steady flow of motivated new engineering talent in the students, and the entrepreneurial
drive to identify, develop and capitalize on the technologies of the new network society were
instrumental in achieving the rapid deployment and expansion of the internet.
As the community of programmers and academic researchers grew, they began to set
themselves about finding more problems for their increasingly capable computers to solve. A doctrine
among this group, who preferred to call themselves hackers (a word that then bore no negative
connotations), held that sharing code and making improvements to programs was the duty of a
computer programmer (Williams, 2002). One hacker whose commitment to this ethos was greater than
most was named Richard Stallman. Stallman, a graduate of Harvard's computer science department,
was working at MIT's AI Lab when he had his first unhappy brush with proprietary software. While
hackers generally held that sharing and improving code was the appropriate behavior for programmers,
the entrepreneurs who were also participating in the cycle of innovation surrounding information
technology and computing wanted to make money. Many hackers moderated the morals of the hacker
ethic with a self-preservation instinct when it came to finding ways to maintain themselves through
coding, but Stallman was not one of those hackers (Raymond). When he found himself confronted with
a proprietary printer driver from Xerox, he became galvanized against the notion of privately-owned
code, and decided to provide an alternative to programs whose source code was locked away.
Richard Stallman would become a hero of the open source software movement, and formed the
Free Software Foundation to support it. He also created the GNU General Public License, a software
license that became a standard in the open source movement. The GPL was designed to keep source
code open and free, and prevented any software written under it from being taken proprietary much to
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
6/21
the consternation of entrepreneurs at places like Xerox. While the open source software community
was largely ignored and marginalized from the perspective of mainstream consumers who were only
beginning to be introduced to personal computers, it nurtured a large community of programmers
worldwide who collaborated on numerous projects that play an important role in the performance of theinternet today, including perhaps most notably the Apache HTTP Server software. Now, many ordinary
internet users may find themselves using open-source software like Firefox to access the web, and even
proprietary software companies have shown a great willingness to provide greater access to their
programs via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that permit third-party additions to products
and services as varied as Facebook, the iPhone and iGoogle widgets. The ethos of free software, and
the hackers who developed much of that early software, would infuse itself into the early networks that
these hackers had access to, and can still be felt today. While free software labored mostly in the
somewhat thankless realms of academia and server-side software, proprietary programs do deserve
credit for developing popular consumer-directed proprietary software such as operating systems,
business applications and computer games which were ultimately responsible for driving the adoption
of personal computers by mainstream consumers. These users would eventually take their computer
experience online where they would encounter open source software, whether they knew it or not.
The development of the internet continued in the relatively isolated world of engineering and
computer sciences institutions and select government agencies for many years, but by 1984 the
deployment of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) first outlined in RFC 675
(Cerf et al, 1974) established the basis for a richer, larger, and more autonomous network environment.
Significantly, the development of the TCP/IP standards led directly to the establishment of the Domain
Name System (DNS), which improved the accessibility of many functions of the still-fledgling internet
to less technically proficient users by translating machine-readable IP addresses into meaningful names
appended with the Top Level Domains (TLD) that are familiar to us today, including .com, .edu and
.gov. As described by RFC 1034, the DNS was deemed necessary because of a growth in the volume
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
7/21
and nature of traffic and functionality on the network (Mockapetris, 1987). The DNS system allowed
for a decentralized method of naming, which ceded the control of naming decisions to a series of
consensus-based consortiums, replacing the earlier regime of a centrally organized HOSTS.txt system,
which had maintained, updated and regularly distributed an authoritative list of network addresses asexplained in RFC 952 (Harrenstien et al, 1985).
As the internet began to spread its reach to foreign countries, the community of network
engineers and computer programmers first grappled with questions of global standards and other
practical logistical questions such as language. Notably, these issues of interoperability in terms of
language are applied only to the human operators on the network because from the beginning the
network was in principle designed to be able to operate on a global scale. As stated in RFC 2277,
Internationalization is for humans. This means that protocols are not subject to internationalization.
(Alvestrand, 1998). Protocols are not subject to internationalization because there is not difference in
the protocol across national boundaries; machine language does not change from one territory to
another. In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to 'internationalizing' the DNS. In RFC
3536, the challenge of internationalization is described: It should be possible for anyone to enter or
read these text strings, which means that Internet users must be able to be enter text in typical input
methods and displayed in any human language. (Hoffman, 2003) Efforts to internationalize HTML
(Yergeau et al, 1997) and FTP (Curtin, 1999) have also been undertaken with the goal of providing a
language- and nationality-agnostic platform for the internet. All of this highlights the fact that when a
typical user sits at their computer, there are several layers of abstraction between what they see on the
screen and what actual computing is being done in the CPU. The choices of language, display and
interface are all examples of things that are quite meaningful for human users, but utterly without
consequence to the actual processing that takes place on the circuit boards. Computers understands disk
partitions, not national borders.
The consequences of these practical decisions taken by network engineers and computer
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
8/21
programmers in the formative years of the internet remain with us today, and indeed provide the
foundation of the deterritorialized network identities that they have enabled. Common to each of these
standards agreements is the underlying attitude or ideology of openness, interoperability and distributed
authority that has been at the heart of the internet's incredible growth and infiltration into numerousaspects of everyday life for many people. Each of these characteristics suggest a distinct departure from
the top-down, hierarchical system of organization preferred by nation-states in establishing power
structures, and instead established autonomy and openness as the guiding principles of a networked
structure of future development. As we shall see, there have been both significant benefits and serious
costs to this paradigm of the internet, and following the massive adoption that has occurred after the
opening of the internet in the mid 1990's there have been efforts to rein in or even fundamentally alter
these principles in the interest of commerce, security and national sovereignty (Talbot, 2005).
In the following section, I will describe the emergence of the deterritorialized network identity,
in particular as it has been observed following widespread public adoption of the internet in the past ten
to fifteen years. Drawing upon examples to demonstrate the gulf that has been observed between
network and national identities, I will suggest a framework for understanding the development of
network identities, and examine the degree to which such identities undermine the concept of a national
identity.
III. The Network Identity
The internet provides a common space for all users who can connect to it. In principle, the
internet that one user sees in one nation is the same internet that another user sees in another nation.
What, then, are the consequences of the presence of this globally-accessible shared space? In many
respects, and in most cases, we can generally state that it is an unqualified good that serves to better
connect geographically dispersed individuals into a globally integrated community. While access to
information and other forms of content was once restricted on the basis of cost, time and distance (that
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
9/21
is, the length and cost in time it took for the information to cross the distance between the point of
inception and the point of consumption), now that same information is immediately available to all
members of the network at the same time at often little or not cost.
Why might there be resistance to the principle of providing equal access to information throughthe global networks of the internet? Here again we see a consequence of the network's disinterestedness
in the peculiarities of nation-states' territorial sovereignty. One factor that limited the ability of nation-
states to extend their influence was the difficulty of establishing authority and maintaining robust lines
of communication across long distances. Eventually, technologies such as the telegraph and the railroad
permitted national governments to conquer space and time with relative ease, although by the time
these technologies arrived on the scene many regions had settled on more modest boundaries than they
may have historically claimed. Nevertheless, the telegraph permitted the creation of standardized time
zones and reorganized life along the regulated rhythm of the clock (Carey, 1989). This technological
innovation in communications eventually paved the way for a global communications network like the
internet, and indeed the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) that was created in 1865 as one
of the very first international organizations, now has a writ that includes oversight of the World
Summit on the Information Society, which is a major working group for internet governance issues. As
is clear, the capability of information and communication technologies such as the internet to permit
communication across national borders represents a challenge to national sovereignty and authority, as
a given nation's ability to control the internet is limited to its own territory.
While a nation-state may have an interest in regulating or controlling access to information, the
network is only interested in increasing its reach and redundancy. Many of the most visible conflicts in
interests have to do with legal issues as has been seen in the hard-fought battles related to intellectual
property on the internet. Determining and enforcing laws within a nation's territory is one of the most
basic exercises in sovereignty, and different countries come to different determinations on which laws
should be enacted. In the context of the freedom of expression, this means that a given expression may
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
10/21
not have the same legal status in two different nations. However, despite the existence of national
TLDs, there is nothing in the Internet Protocol that restricts or limits the access of those TLDs to
citizens or residents of that nation, and so users from one country may in principle visit websites that
are hosted in any other country, where they may see content that violates the user's national decency or obscenity laws. Similarly, for popular websites and services that operate internationally it can be
maddening to attempt to screen the millions or billions of pieces of content that they serve for its legal
status in each nation.
YouTube, the video-sharing website, has on many occasions played host to content that was
deemed to violate the law in nations like Thailand, Turkey and Pakistan, leading to the site being
blocked by national telecom regulators in those countries (Rosen, 2008). The offending content in each
case were videos that, while insulting to revered national figures like Mustafa Kemal Attaturk or King
Adulyadej, fell well within free-speech protections guaranteed in the United States by the First
Amendment. If the servers containing the offending content are not in Thai or Turkish territory, yet the
videos are nonetheless accessible in those countries, what is the legal status of those videos? Certainly
Thai or Turkish governments can outlaw the viewing or display of expressions that are deemed
offensive, but they have little recourse against YouTube apart from the wholesale blocking of the entire
site if they cannot persuade YouTube's owner, Google, to remove the content. Pakistan, when acting to
block content that offended similar sensibilities in that country, accidentally blocked access to the
popular website for more than two hours, drawing attention to the global impact that national actions
can have across the internet as a whole (Sandoval, 2008).
Similarly, the web portal Yahoo ran afoul of obscenity laws in France in 2001 when an auction
site that it ran was found to be listing Nazi memorabilia for sale on its yahoo.fr domain (the sale of
Nazi symbols is illegal in France). Although Yahoo decided to remove the offending items from and
ban further sales of Nazi memorabilia, it insisted that it was doing so voluntarily and not pursuant to
any court order, arguing that the French courts had no jurisdiction over Yahoo's content, which was
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
11/21
located on servers in the United States (BBC, 2001). Again, the offending content was not held on
servers under the jurisdiction of the French courts, and yet French people were able to access the
offending content and some had been complaining about it. In this situation does the French law, which
is founded in a particularly French context (having fought against, and been occupied by, the Nazi's),have authority over historical objects that may not be considered offensive (or at least not criminally
so) in another national context? Whose interests are paramount in this sort of disagreement? With large
internet firms like Yahoo and Microsoft setting up server farms around the world (Mehta, 2006), and
with the global quality of the network permitting data to be pulled from computers in distant places,
what is the significance of the territorial location of internet infrastructure?
Recently, the operators of the popular BitTorrent file-sharing website the Pirate Bay were
convicted in a Swedish court of assisting in copyright infringement, however because their servers are
not located in Sweden, the site continues to operate to this day (Pfanner, 2009). What does it mean for
intellectual property rights when Hollywood studios follow a trail of American content pirates that
leads to another country? If American consumers can access content via a BitTorrent tracker in
Sweden, and download it with the distributed assistance of peers in many other nations, then which
national authority is responsible for policing such activity? And what, if anything, would have been the
consequence of a successful bid by the organization to buy the micro-(non)nation of Sealand in an
effort to establish a 'copyright-free nation' (Beschizza, 2007)? Clearly, the problems presented by the
deterritorialized nature of the internet confound the capabilities of individual nations acting alone and
demand international coordination to resolve. Yet this cooperation is not always readily found.
In the immediate aftermath of their conviction for assisting copyright infringement, the Pirate
Bay posted a message on their website presumably intended to reassure their users, but also insightfully
encapsulating the notion of a network identity. The message read: Don't worry - we're from the
internets [sic]. It's going to be alright. While perhaps intended as a cheeky thumbing-of-the-nose at the
Swedish prosecutors and copyright holders who pressed the case against them, this comment is a
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
12/21
revealing articulation of a kind of network identity. The suggestion that one can be 'from' the internet
posits an identity that is removed from the physical, territorial concerns so central to the national
identity. This is the network identity that comes into being in the social space of the internet, where
users are unbound from the ethnic, cultural, national and other identities that are imposed upon them byforces beyond their control. Offline, one cannot control the gender that they were born, the ethnic
group to which they belong by virtue of their genes, or the nation of which they are a citizen as a
consequence of their birth. Online, however, one's network identity is created through a series of
decisions, actions and disclosures that are more or less under the user's control. Heretofore hard and
fast identities such as gender can be, and are, swapped (Yee, 2006). User identities, though perhaps
becoming more tied to real life identities in some respects due to the trends of the reigning social
network sites (SNS) that encourage such transparency, are nonetheless entirely voluntary, and
anonymity is still the norm for many users in their interactions with others online.
Likewise, politically or culturally marginalized identities that are unable to find themselves
represented within the national culture of the state in which they live are able to find virtual
communities of support online, built on the basis of a shared ethnic or racial identity (Parham, 2004).
These diasporic communities serve to connect individuals with others who share their ethnic or racial
identity, although this may come at the expense of the establishment of their new national identity.
Consider a migrant who enters a new nation. Rather than absorb the national culture through the
process of assimilation, they may decide instead to maintain their pre-existing identity. While in the
past this would have been a difficult and perhaps eccentric decision (and one that should give the
nation-state that has naturalized this new resident cause for concern), the modern systems of global
communication permits a person to maintain the use of their native language and their participation in
the culture of their original home country. Among the participants in their diasporic community would
no doubt be other expatriates and migrants who had likewise left the home country. Through their
maintenance of a common space to practice and retain their ethnic or racial identity by participating in
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
13/21
the collaborative process of developing imagined communities (Anderson, 1983), despite their absence
from the real territory and community that they are attempting to recreate in a virtual space, these
migrants engage in the creation and maintenance of network identities that represent them as a group
online.The relationship between network identities and Anderson's conception of the imagined
community is not dissimilar. Anderson writes: regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that
may prevail in each [community], the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.
(ibid: 7) Similarly, among internet identities, there are conceptions of a kinship among internet users,
that they have similar expectations and values related to the open access of information, and of free
communication across geographies. As we have seen, these expectations frequently come into conflict
with the interests and expectations of nation-states, who attempt to enforce their will through
regulations on telecommunications companies, internet service providers and media content
distributors.
So how can we speak of a framework for understanding this networked identity? It is an identity
that is informed by the libertarian principles of openness and freedom of action that were inscribed by
the founders and developers of the network. It is also an identity which values the sharing of programs
and content among users for the mutual enrichment of all, and establishes collaborative projects and
organizations as a means of preserving the collective intelligence of the network. Through the
development of user-contributed works, including everything from the content that a user reads online,
to the internet browser software that they utilize to display that content, to the markup language that
permits the content to be displayed, to the server software that is employed to connect a user to that
content, and even the network architecture that was developed within consensus-based working groups
to manage the connection of the user to that content, users participate in creating the shared network
identity of the internet every time they forward an email, conduct an internet search or solve a
reCAPTCHA. This participatory component of the network identity reflects the interactive nature of
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
14/21
the internet, and finds its expression in the increasingly standardized tools of community websites.
These include the creation of individual user 'profiles' common on social network and other social
media sites, as well as the user contribution of content ranging from actions as discrete as 'tagging'
(categorizing) a photograph, or as public as a posting a microblog status update. Common to each of these expressions of the network identity are the elements of collaboration and participation, the very
same values that Steve Crocker sought to engender in contributions to the Request For Comment series
from the very beginning of the internet.
IV. Network Identities and Cyber-Security
Given that network identities have emerged as a competitor to national identites, one that
encourage users to participate in the development of such a deterritorialized and transnational project as
the internet, how do nation-states respond to this challenge to their authority and influence over their
citizens? In the remaining section of this paper I will discuss the ways in which the nation-state has
pushed back against threats to its sovereignty, and conclude with some remarks on the future
ramifications of the still-widening gulf separating national identities from the emerging network
identity.
Beyond questions of socialization and integration, network identities can threaten national
identities as a consequence of their ability to enable criminal activity on a more sophisticated and
dangerous level. Decentralized information and communication technologies enabled by the internet
permit the remote planning, monitoring and execution of criminal and terrorist schemes (Lenk, 1997).
While nation-states take efforts to protect the territorial integrity of their nation from invasion by
foreign armies, the avenues to the center of their networked communication infrastructure are highly
accessible and exposed (Castells, 2001: 159). The challenge of instituting robust security of
communication networks while simultaneously ensuring their ordinary, open function have stymied
internet security specialists, and some have even suggested that the network, as currently organized, is
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
15/21
irretrievably insecure as a consequence of the essentially trust-based foundation of packet-switching
(Talbot, 2005).
With the increasingly widespread access to the internet among users from around the globe,
malevolent actors have found ample targets for their various activities, from identity theft and creditcard fraud, to industrial espionage and the construction of massive botnets (Weber, 2007). Botnets are
collections of hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of ordinary user's computers that have been
infected by malware intended to combine the processing power and bandwidth of many individual
machines for the purpose of sending spam emails or conducting malicious denial of service attacks to
knock websites and other internet services offline by flooding them with more requests than the server
can handle. This form of distributed computing is not unlike much more benign programs such as
Folding @Home , which employs idle computer's bandwidth and computing power to conduct intensive
calculations in an effort to simulate protein folding and other molecular dynamics, but of course applies
the same principle of combined computing power to decidedly less beneficial ends.
Confronted with the fact that thousands of their own computers may well be compromised by
such botnets, how are national governments to respond to this threat? The hackers who develop and
deploy botnets can sometimes be pinpointed and arrested or neutralized, but their creations live on until
infected users format their hard drives or otherwise remove the malicious programs from their
computers. Pervasive security threats also endanger expensive and highly-classified military networks
and hardware. The greater their reliance on networked communications become, the more susceptible
societies become to threats to their national communications infrastructure. And now, America's
critical infrastructure are largely networked and exposed to the kind of vulnerabilities that should
certainly concern American policymakers and defense experts. Notably, the Obama administration has
suggested that it will announce the formation of a cyber warfare command in the American defense
apparatus, which will be responsible for hardening and defending American military and critical
infrastructure networks (Gorman & Dreazon, 2009). By breaking out cyber defense as requiring its own
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
16/21
command structure, it appears that the administration and defense department take this challenge
seriously.
Reports have also noted that the United States has trained itself for substantial offensive
cyberwarfare tactics should the need arise, including potential pre-emptive strikes to disable or render inert dangerous viruses and botnets (Sanger, et al, 2009). It is hard to know what the effectiveness of a
pre-emptive cyber-war strike would be, but it should be noted that the risks are high for states engaging
in cyber-warfare. Sustained attacks by black hat operators marshaling large botnets against American
networks can be carried out by relatively few individuals, and in principle from any place in the world.
These actors may also be savvy hackers who are adept at hiding their location or true identity, and the
danger of a pre-emptive strike would be hitting the wrong target and suffering a retaliatory blow in
response. An policy of mutually-assured destruction is not tenable in cyber-warfare when your
opponent may only be borrowing their infrastructure for the purposes of their attack, and have no
qualms about sacrificing it in the service of achieving their strategic goals.
Complicating these issues are the emerging paradigms of cyber-warfare wherein non-state
actors conduct campaigns in tandem with, or even independently of, state actions. From the perspective
of a national government, it can be quite difficult to determine whether or not malevolent hackers are
operating under the instruction of a rival national government, or simply in solidarity with it.
Obviously, the political and strategic ramifications can considerably hamper retaliatory action, as
holding a host state responsible for the actions of rogue citizens of that state would introduce a
troublesome precedent; how could a state be confident that similarly nationalistic hackers in their own
territory would not expose them to similar retaliation? Indeed, given the ease of international travel,
what would stop agent provocateur's from entering a country and the perpetrating such an attack to
provide their own state with the justification to respond? With a good enough understanding of IP
masking or other techniques of misdirection, hackers could conceivably give the impression of a
foreign cyber-attack without even leaving their home nation. Similar to our earlier discussion of the
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
17/21
difficulty of applying national legal jurisdiction on the deterritorialized internet, the global distribution
and accessibility of the network permits any sufficiently motivated actor, anywhere, to assault any
other connected target, no matter where they are physically located in relation to their attacker.
Further emphasizing the value that information and communication technologies have for asymmetrical warfare, we can see the deployment of civilian technologies being employed by militants
in their clashes with nation-states. During the recent attacks in Mumbai, India, terrorists reportedly
gathered intelligence in the midst of the 3-day battle by watching live television news feeds in the
hotels that they had taken over, and also conferred by satellite phone with individuals in Pakistan who
were relaying tactical information gleaned from news reports (Frater, 2008). A scare shook the
microblogging service Twitter when Indian authorities posted a directive that users not post any tactical
details (such as a the movements of commando units outside the hotels), implying that the terrorists
inside were keeping tabs on those updates (Wolfe, 2008). After the attacks, calls were even made to
restrict access to Google's mapping software, Google Earth, because it was alleged that the terrorists
used it to plan their attack (Bedi, 2008).
What is clear from these examples is that the access to valuable real-time information is no
longer limited to the high commands and intelligence services of national militaries, but rather has been
distributed throughout the network for any actor that can access them. Maps, satellite photos and
descriptions of the layout of the hotels are available on tourist resources and websites for
reconnaissance purposes. Additionally, sophisticated and widely dispersed communication
technologies allow actions to be commanded remotely, even piggy-backing onto the more expensive
satellite infrastructure of the international news media to provide live intelligence. It does not seem far-
fetched to imagine criminals and terrorists employing the latest tools of real-time information gathering
like microblogging services, voice over internet protocol, and lifestreaming video broadcasts as a
mechanism of increasing the effectiveness of their efforts without a major investment in infrastructure,
and criminal networks already employ many of the legacy communication platforms of the internet
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
18/21
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
19/21
further embed it in our everyday lives. The development of network identities may be threatening for
the continued dominance of national identities, but from the perspective of serving users they may be a
more useful mechanism for establishing identity than nationality in any case. With the rise of the
network society, the preeminent position of the nation-state in the conception of identity has lost somerelevance, particularly when compared with the internet's ability to connect groups whose relationship
is more meaningful than simply being born in the same national jurisdiction. While we can expect that
the nation-state will bemoan this relative diminishing of authority, we can rest assured that this decline
will not affect all nation-states equally; some nation-states will no doubt continue to be influential and
powerful actors that are able to enforce their will upon others, as they have been able to in the previous
system. The difference now will be that instead of being the big boss at the top of the org chart, nation-
states will be just another node in the network connecting human identities through a web of
association, relevance and community. In this network society, we may say that our identity does not
come from a nation; it comes from the internets.
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
20/21
Works Cited:
Abbate, J. (1999) Inventing the Internet. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Alvestrand, H. (1998) RFC 2277: IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages. Network Working Group . Available online at: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2277
Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism.London: Verso.
BBC. (2001) Yahoo! Bans Nazi Sales. 01/03/2001.
Bedi, R. Mumbai attacks: Indian suit against Google Earth over image use by terrorists. TheTelegraph (UK). 12/09/2008.
Beschizza, R. The Pirate Bay Seeks to Buy Sealand. Wired. 01/15/2007.
Carey, J. (1989) Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph. Communication as Culture(Carey, ed.) London: Routledge.
Castells, M. (2001) The Internet Galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cerf, V., Dalal, Y., Sunshine, C. (1974) RFC 675: Specification of Internet Transmission ControlProgram. Network Working Group. Available online at: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc675
Crocker, S. (1969) RFC 3: Documentation Conventions. Network Working Group . Available onlineat: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3
Crocker, S. How the Internet Got Its Rules. New York Times . 04/06/2009.
Curtin, B. (1999) RFC 2640: Internationalization of the File Transfer Protocol. Network Working Group . Available online at: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2640
Frater, P. Indian journalists in media firestorm. Variety. 11/30/2008.
Gorman, S. & Dreazon, Y. New Military Command to Focus on Cybersecurity. Wall Street Journal .04/22/09.
Harrenstien, K., Stahl, M., Feinler, E. (1985) RFC 953: DOD Internet Host Table Specifications. Network Working Group. Available online at: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc952
Hoffman, P. (2003) RFC 3536: Terminology Used in Internationalization in the IETF. Network Working Group . Available online at: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3536
Leiner, B., Cerf, V., Clark, D., Kahn, R., Kleinrock, L., Lynch, D., Postel, J., Roberts, L. & Wolff, S.(2003) A Brief History of the Internet version 3.32. Published by the Internet Society.Available online at: http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml
Lenk, K. (1997) The challenge of cyberspatial forms of human interaction to territorial governance
-
8/9/2019 Don't Worry, We're From the Internets!
21/21
and policing. The Governance of Cyberspace , Loader, B. (ed). London: Routledge.
Mehta, S. Behold the server farm. Fortune. 7/28/2006.
Mockapetris, P. (1987) RFC 1034: Domain Names: Concepts and Facilities. Network Working Group . Available online at: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034
Parham, A. (2004) Diaspora, Community and Communication: Internet Use in Transnational Haiti.Global Networks (4)2.
Pfanner, E. Four Convicted in Sweden in Internet Piracy Case. New York Times . 04/17/2009.
Raymond, E. Hacker Ethic. The Jargon File v. 4.4.7. Available online at:http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html
Rosen, J. Google's Gatekeepers. New York Times Magazine . 11/28/2008.
Sandoval, G. YouTube blames Pakistan network for 2-hour outage. CNet News. 2/24/2008.
Sanger, D., Markoff, J. & Shanker, T. U.S. Steps Up Effort on Digital Defense. New York Times.04/27/2009.
Talbot, D. The Internet is Broken. Technology Review. 12/01/2005.
Weber, T. Criminals 'May Overwhelm the Web.' BBC. 01/25/2007.
Williams, S. (2002) Free as in Freedom. Sebastapol,CA: O'Reilly.
Wolfe, A. Twitter In Controversial Spotlight Amid Mumbai Attacks. Information Week. 11/29/2008.
Yee, N. (2006) The Demographics, Motivations, and Derived Experiences of Users of MassivelyMulti-User Online Graphical Environments Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments.Volume 15.
Yergeau, F. (2003) RFC 3629: UTF-8, a Transformation Format of ISO 10646. Network Working Group . Available online at: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629