Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace Read Free Page B

away, in real time. Through vast aggregations of data we can now predict when disease outbreaks are likely to occur, and take precautionary measures. We can pinpoint our exact longitude and latitude, identify the nearest wifi hotspot, and notify a friend that we are, well, nearby and would like to meet.
    But there is a dark side to all this connectivity: malicious threats that are growing from the inside out, a global disease with many symptoms that is buttressed by disparate and mutually reinforcing causes. Some of these forces are the unintended by-products of the digital universe into which we have thrust ourselves, mostly with blind acceptance. Others are more sinister, deliberate manipulations that exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities in cyberspace. Together they threaten to destroy the fragile ecosystem we have come to take for granted.
    Social networking, cloud computing, and mobile forms of connectivity are convenient and fun, but they are also a dangerous brew. Data once stored on our actual desktops and in filing cabinets now evaporates into the “cloud,” entrusted to third parties beyond our control.Few of us realize that data stored by Google, even data located on machines in foreign jurisdictions, are subject to the U.S. Patriot Act because Google is headquartered in the United States and the Act compels it to turn over data when asked to do so, no matter where it is stored. (For this reason, some European countries are debating laws that will ban public officials from using Google and/or other cloud computing services that could put their citizens’ personal information at risk.) Mobile connectivity and social networking might give us instant awareness of each other’s thoughts, habits, and activities, but in using them we have also entrusted an unprecedented amount of information about ourselves to private companies. We can now be tracked in time and space with a degree of precision that would make tyrants of days past envious – all by our own consent.Mobile devices are what Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain, author of
The Future of the Internet
, calls “tethered appliances”: they corral us into walled gardens controlled by others, with unknown repercussions.
    These technological changes are occurring alongside a major demographic shift in cyberspace. The Internet may have been bornin the West but its future will almost certainly be decided elsewhere. North Americans and Europeans make up less than 25 percent of Internet users, and the West in general is almost at saturation point. Asia, on the other hand, comprises nearly 50 percent of the world’s Internet population (the most by region), and only 28 percent of its people are online (next to last by region). Some of the fastest growth is happening among the world’s weakest states, in zones of conflict where authoritarianism (or something close), mass youth unemployment, and organized crime prevail. How burgeoning populations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America will use and shape cyberspace is an open question.
    The young “netizens” who launched the Arab Spring were born into a world of satellite broadcasts, mobile phones, and Internet cafés. They were plugged in to the digital world and able to exploit viral networks in ways difficult for authorities to anticipate or control. Meanwhile, perhaps the most innovative users of social networking and mobile technologies in Latin America today are the drug cartels, which use these tools to instill fear in citizens and lawmakers, intimidate journalists, and suppress free speech. To understand how and in what ways cyberspace will be used in the years to come we need to analyze innovation from the global South and East, from users in cities like Tegucigalpa, Nairobi, and Shanghai, the new centres of gravity for cyberspace.
    •  •  •
    And then there is cyber crime , a part of cyberspace since the origins of the Internet, but now explosive in terms of its growth and complexity.