The Global Cooperation in Cyberspace Initiative seeks to reduce conflict, crime and other disruptions in cyberspace and promote stability, innovation and inclusion.
EWI Senior Vice President Bruce McConnell talks to the Wall Street Journal blog "China Real Time Report" about cyber terrorism.
"There is very little cyber-war or cyber-terrorism," McConnell argued, "Exaggerating the threat does not help defeat it.”
EastWest Institute Senior Vice President Bruce McConnell was a featured speaker at the first "World Internet Conference" (Wuzhen Summit) on November 19-21.
Jointly organized by the Cyberspace Administration of China and the People's Government of Zhejiang Province, PRC, the “World Internet Conference” centered on the theme of "An Interconnected World Shared and Governed by All." Leading global figures from governments, international organizations, enterprises, science and technology communities as well as civil societies discussed and exchanged ideas about ways to develop the Internet to improve equitable development and human welfare.
For more information about the conference, please visit www.wicwuzhen.cn.
In New Europe, EWI Fellow Greg Austin looks at some recent reports that highlight Russia's growing cyber espionage and defense capabilities.
In just two weeks, Russia has returned to the news as a military cyber power in three separate reports: one about its superior stealth, a second about its nuclear missiles, and a third reporting a deeper cyber alliance with China. Meanwhile, as important as these issues are to international and individual security, diplomacy between Russia and the European Union (EU) on the issues is only weakly developed.
On 16 October, in Austin Texas, the Director of National Intelligence in the United States, James Clapper, said “I worry a lot more about the Russians” when it comes to U.S. defences in cyberspace, according to the Wall St Journal. He observed that the Russians are more stealthy in their cyber operations than China, leaving fewer traces of their activity. One presumes he was talking more of cyber espionage, given that Russia has been named in public reports by the U.S. government, along with China (France and Israel) as the main source of cyber espionage threats to the United States.
On the same day, the Russian Ministry of Defence announced that its Strategic Missile Forces would be creating new cyber defence units as part of the transition by the armed forces to automated (computerized) command and control. These units would be assigned both to silo-based and mobile nuclear missiles. Affirming that the forces would be equipped with the most modern equipment, the associated photograph carries the image of a very clunky laptop. This image confirmed pictorially that the announcement by the Russian armed forces puts them a decade (or even decades) behind the United States in developing this particular capability. Such an imbalance in the cyber defence capability of the strategic missile forces of the two sides is highly dangerous. Some analyst believe that it invites the more powerful side (the United States) to consider preemptive use of cyber attacks against the strategic nuclear command control of the weaker side (Russia), thereby undermining strategic stability. On 21 October, the Russian newspaper, Kommersant, reported that President Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, would sign a bilateral treaty on cyberspace issues during a visit by the Russian to Beijing on 10 November. While the treaty itself may be largely symbolic, it will over time provide framework for the two countries to build a degree of interdependence between the IT sectors of the two countries. At the moment, such technology transfer is quite weak since China prefers, and has rather easy access to Western IT products. If anything, it will be Russia who may gain most in information technology transfer from China in the long run. Russia has niche capabilities in cyber military and surveillance technologies, but China is advancing on a broader front.
The treaty will likely focus most on the shared commitment of Russia and China to create international norms that privilege the state over the private citizen in control of the internet and constrain internet-based interventions in domestic politics by foreign activists or other states.
This is an important area of policy to monitor. Russia is, as James Clapper indicated, for now more powerful than China in military and surveillance technologies in cyberspace. In the 2014 rankings for the annual network readiness index of the World Economic Forum, Russia stood at 50th, up from 54th, the year before. In contrast, China was ranked in 2014 at 62nd, down from 61st in 2013. In a major report on EU cyber diplomacy by two European think tanks published in June 2014, the lack of effective collaboration between the Union and Russia is a recurrent theme. Russia’s cyber power will only increase. We need to understand it better.
On September 30, EWI Professorial Fellow Greg Austin will introduce key policy findings from his new book, Cyber Policy in China, during a seminar on "Challenges and Opportunities for the UK and Europe" at King's College, London.
Few doubt that China wants to be a major economic and military power on the world stage. To achieve this ambitious goal, however, the country’s leaders know that China must first become an advanced information-based society. But does China have what it takes to get there? Are its leaders prepared to make the tough choices required to secure China’s cyber future? Or is there a fundamental mismatch between China’s cyber ambitions and the policies pursued by the Communist Party until now?
Cyber Policy in China offers the first comprehensive analysis of China’s information society. It explores the key practical challenges facing Chinese politicians as they try to marry the development of modern information and communications technology with old ways of governing their people and conducting international relations. Fundamental realities of the information age, not least its globalizing character, are forcing the pace of technological change in China and are not fully compatible with the old PRC ethics of stability, national industrial strength and sovereignty. What happens to China in future decades will depend on the ethical choices its leaders are willing to make today. The stakes are high, but if China’s ruling party does not adapt more aggressively to the defining realities of power and social organization in the information age, the "China dream" looks unlikely to become a reality.
Click here for more information.
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EWI Senior Vice President Bruce McConnell discusses the many challenges facing long-established national and international rules of law.
In a New York Times op-ed entitled “The Revolt of the Weak” (September 1, 2014), David Brooks ably catalogues the challenges of governing in today’s world, and, in particular, how hard it is for those in power to step back from the immediate and address what he calls “a crisis of context.” By this phrase he points to “certain weak movements and nations, beset by internal contradictions, that can’t compete if they play by the normal rules of civilization. Therefore, they are conspiring to blow up the rule book.” He illustrates with examples of Putin and the Islamic State, stating that they “are not threats to American national security, narrowly defined. They are threats to our civilizational order.”
It is not news that the “weak” feel disenfranchised from the current order. For many, including eight of the world’s ten most-populous nations, the post-World War II institutions were formed without their real participation. These institutions, formed by the victorious Allied powers, have served humanity remarkably well for over 60 years. But their time is coming to an end, and the breakdown in respect for the rule of international law by a “coalition of the unsuccessful” is a symptom of an accelerating global shift in concepts of power and order.
In the United States, our national government suffers from its own crisis of legitimacy, led by a Congress that is unable to accomplish the basic tasks of governance, and fed by increasing partisanship. As the leader of the free world and founding partner of the existing world order, America retains a diminishing claim to moral and political leadership on the global stage, even while it remains the most sought after destination for immigrants from the “weaker” world.
The context crisis is accelerated by technology, with its explosion of transparency, its stimulation of expectations of participation, its “flattening” power, and its ability to support collaboration across boundaries of all kinds. The democratization of information access is a direct threat to authoritarian regimes, which work hard to control its impact. But it is an indirect threat to industrial-age structures of any scale, whether private or public.
In China last month, a capital manager observed that the advent of smart phones has created 600 million citizen journalists, undercutting the role of the party cadres as information sources and aiding President Xi’s ambitious anti-corruption campaign. A senior government researcher opined that “the erosion of boundaries means the only remaining potential enemy of the State is the people.”
It is not only on traditional security issues that national and international institutions are proving incapable of acting quickly and effectively. As Susan Rice commented last year in an address entitled “America’s Future in Asia,” “many of Asia’s most vexing security challenges are transnational security threats that transcend borders like climate change, piracy, infectious disease, transnational crime, cyber theft, and the modern-day slavery of human trafficking.” For each of these a patchwork of formal and ad hoc arrangements is struggling to address the risks.
We are now at the stage where the outlines of the problem are becoming clearer, and we need to be alert not to fall for too long into merely admiring the problem for its difficulty and complexity. Rather, we need to explore alternative institutions that can take the place of those that are proving incapable of coming up with real solutions.
There is a definite role here for experimentation and a great need for new models to build on. For example, in April 2014 the government of Brazil hosted an international town-hall meeting—“NetMundial”—on the future governance of cyberspace. The 1,480 participants from 97 nations, convened under the banner of “multi-stakeholderism,” ranged from ambassadors to academicians, from Microsoft engineers to a Chilean non-profit promoting the right of digital access. As I wrote then:
Multi-stakeholderism, like many young life forms, is an awkward and somewhat tentative thing. Seven languages spoken with consecutive translation, four sectors represented plus the remote hubs, representatives standing in line to make two-minute interventions, and the open observation of the small drafting groups produced a slow and only “rough” consensus. And, with no governmental representatives on the drafting groups, one had the unique experience of seeing Canadian, German and U.S. cyber ambassadors leaning in, straining to hear the deliberations.
Clearly such a mechanism is not ready to be applied to dangerous security problems. But then, neither was the League of Nations. And, while a multi-stakeholder approach is promising, robust 21st century institutions will meet what are now universal expectations of transparency, accountability, inclusiveness, participation, predictability, agility, and effectiveness. The EastWest Institute is attempting to model these characteristics in its initiative to mitigate the negative effects of the increasing balkanization of the Internet.
We have a long road ahead, and we must cover it quickly. With, diligence, goodwill and tremendous luck, we can avoid two world wars to cement this transition.
