Implications for National Security Planning, Strategic Communications, and Decision-making
Computers have changed how we do almost everything. Soon they may alter how national security gets done. There is a lot more on the information superhighway these days than just information. There is a traffic jam of conversation facilitated by E-mail, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social networking tools (often collectively called Web 2.0) that facilitate discussion, debate, and exchanging ideas on a global scale. This unprecedented capacity to listen and respond is inexorably restructuring how knowledge is created and used.
The New strategies Net
Networks and National Security
Obstacles and Opportunities
Joining the Brave New strategies World
About the Moderator
Future Research
Social networking, through tools like E-Bay and Craigslist, has already profoundly redefined business practices.[1] The 2008 presidential elections saw social networking mobilized in revolutionary ways to garner popular support and raise money. The impact of social networking won’t stop with business and politics. Everything, including national security will be next.
Washington is well behind in its willingness and capacity to adapt to the world of Web 2.0. Even the new strategies presidential administration with a well-earned reputation for being “web-savvy,” has its troubles. A panel of experts assembled by The Washington Post gave the new strategies WhiteHouse.gov Web site an averaged grade of C plus.[2] While the White House as well as many federal agencies are experimenting with social networking tools, their efforts are unguided by sound research or clear and coherent policies that encourage innovation, but at the same time protect individual liberties and privacy and promote information assura
nce. The hierarchical practices of traditional government are not keeping up. They are inadequate to exploit the explosion of social networking systems.
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| Social Networking and National Security |
Fundamental reforms will be required for conducting national security in a world driven by global listening. Washington cannot fully adopt and exploit social networking systems without profoundly changing the process of governance. Advocating for such change, however, is premature. First, the government must understand and develop the means to interact in the new strategies world in which it lives.
Social Networking and National Security: New strategies Net
Social networking involves linking individuals together as part of a voluntary group. Persons join groups because they share common attributes, interests, activities, or causes. Within the group they exchange information, goods, services, and opinions. As the group grows it forms a network.
A social network is a complex system. When systems become complex, their behavior cannot be easily predicted by traditional methods of analysis: breaking a system into its component parts and analyzing elements in detail.[3] As Physicist Philip Anderson observed, “aggregations of anything from atoms to people exhibit complex behavior that cannot be predicted by observing the component parts. Chemistry isn’t just applied physics—you cannot understand all the properties of water from studying its constituent atoms in isolation.”[4] Likewise, social network is more than simply the sum of the attitudes or activities of its members. The system’s complexity creates outcomes that are than the sum of the group.
Furthermore, outcomes can be dramatically different from those that might emerge from a more organized system such as a government bureaucracy. That is because they are usually “nonlinear,” often described as “disorganized” systems. Unlike hierarchal organizations the outputs of a social network are less predictable and controllable. They are subjected to fewer rules and controls.
Social networks are not limited to the Internet. Computer technology, however, has greatly expanded the capacity and speed for establishing networks of people. While informal networks have existed since the inception of the World Wide Web, they have dramatically proliferated since 2003. This was in part due to the dramatic expansion of the capacity to store data and exponential decline in the cost of information storage and retrieval. New strategies software created programs that could store and share user profile and preferences and allow individuals to post information as blogs, video clips, photographs, and audio files. The popularity of new strategies Web tools and services is remarkable. MySpace, for example, established in 2003 with three years had 80 million members and hosted more 6 million Web pages.[5] In less than eight years Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, has grown to four million individual pages, all created, edited, and monitored by individual volunteers. By 2009, the number of messages transmitted on Facebook exceeded those sent by email.
Additionally, digital networking is not tied to a specific platform. For example, increasingly social networking applications are being developed for cell phones. Already half the world’s population (more three billion people) has access to cell phone. New strategies social networking could well emerge in the future as nanotechnologies and new strategies materials are developed that could greatly reduce weight, the cost and power requirements for information sharing technologies.[6]
Networks and National Security
The growth of Web 2.0, its expanding global reach, and potential new strategies technologies to further its use and adoption, argue this is change in the form of human communication that cannot be ignored. The application of online social networks has impacted every field of human endeavor from education to healthcare. National security is no exception, In February 2000, for example, a handful of officers teaching at West Point created “companycommand.com,” a web portal to allow junior Army officers to share experiences and lessons learned. By 2005, the site had over 10,000 members. It was officially adopted by the Army as a professional development tool.[7]
GovLoop, an online information sharing network to facilitate collaboration between government employees and contractors was created a Department of Homeland Security employee in his spare time. It now has over 7,000 users across federal, state, and local governments and the private sector and academia.
Not only have some government agencies developed or adapted Web 2.0 systems, some have used or exploited public social networking tools. There is not consolidated list of all the on-going government initiatives. A cursory search of the Internet, however, reveals many examples. For instance, during the 2008 terrorists attacks in Mumbai individuals used Twitter to send on the scene updates including distributing the emergency contact number for the State Department Consular Call Center. Colleen Graffy, the State Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy, used Twitter-postings to provide updates on her personal experiences. The FBI also recently established a twitter account under FBIpressoffice. Additionally, innovations in “open-government” are not limited to twitter. The former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff had his own blog. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence maintains its own email list-serve which includes updates from the FBI and Homeland Security. Clearly, many agencies are experimenting with social networking initiatives.
Applications for social networking, however, are not limited to the practice of military tactics, intelligence, law enforcement, or other operational activities related to national security. National Defense University researchers Mark Drapeau and Linton Wells argue, “[t]he proliferation of social software has ramifications for U.S. national security, spanning future operational challenges of a traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive nature. Failure to adopt these tools may reduce an organization’s relative capabilities over time….Governments that harness its potential power can interact better with citizens and anticipate emerging issue.”[8] Social networking has the potential to affect every aspect of national security.
Washington’s capacity to adapt Web 2.0 to national security has not been coherent, comprehensive, or integrated. While organizations have recognized and adopted some tools such as CompanyCommand and GovLoop, others have been more cautious. Some agencies, for example, ban the use of social networking tools such as Facebook.
The Federal Web Managers Council details a list of government obstacles to the effective adoption of social networking technologies.[9] These include: Institutional barriers, such as cultural issues and lack of a strategy for using new strategies tools; Lack of access to access to online tools; Security and privacy concerns;Resources and budgeting; and Legal concerns and terms of service restrictions. These impediments make it hard for traditional government bureaucracies to adopt social networking practices. While the Federal Web Managers Council offers some potential solution to overcome these obstacles, such initiatives have not been uniformly applied across government. Nor is it clear that all the major impediments can be overcome with more significant changes in government programs and policies.
Social Networking and National Security: Obstacles and Opportunities
Even if the organizational and institutional government barriers to Web 2.0 could be overcome, there are legitimate concerns over making Government 2.0 a national security instrument. The most widely voiced concern is information assurance, knowing that the data being shared is precise and reliable. Rumors, perfidy, or inaccurate information can be dispersed as rapidly as truthful and exact knowledge.
Web 2.0 can also create “information overload” burdening the network which useless data that could complicate, rather than empower analysis and decision-making. For example, while the White House allows individuals to post comments on WhiteHouse.gov and maintains MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook accounts, it receives so much information that it is physically impossible to read, let alone assess all the data.
In addition, while social networking facilitates conversation it does not necessarily promote effective knowledge creation. The information age has empowered both our scientific and narrative cultures. Information technology allows researchers to conduct more and better analysis, but it also allows opinion makers to spin better, more compelling stories, faster, and proliferate them more widely.[10]
On the other hand, others argue that the great strength of social networking is that it creates “open” systems which allows for self-correction. Individuals can more readily challenge inaccurate information and offer corrections. Recent research finds, for example, that Wikipedia maintains a high level of accuracy even though editing in the web is open to any individual.[11]
Additionally, others argue that the number and diversity of individuals that can be engaged in global listening far exceeds the risks. Michael Tanji, a proponent of adapting Web 2.0 to national security decision-making argues, “[I]n fact in terms of intellectual capital, a virtual think tank can be at least an order of magnitude larger than any current think tank 1.0 in existence today…. the more minds working on a given problem the better the solution. It is unlikely that a policymaker would care one way or another if a good idea was generated by an individual or a group, but as a friend who was an early adopter of the 2.0 approach explains: ‘None of us is as smart as all of us.”[12]
This debate is far from over. Research in the field of social networking is hard pressed to keep up with the rapid pace of change in how information technologies are fielded and employed. Understanding social networking requires a multi-disciplinary approach to research that combines the techniques of the social sciences with “hard science” disciplines. This mix of disciplines is often called “network science.” Network science examines how networks function.[13] They study diverse physical, informational, biological, cognitive, and social networks searching for common principles, algorithms and tools that drive network behavior. The understanding of networks can be applied to a range of challenges from combating terrorist organizations to organizing disaster response. This science will be particularly fruitful for understanding how online social networks functions as well as how they can exploited, disrupted, manipulated, or improved upon.
Joining the Brave New strategies World
Given the difficulty Washington has adopting new strategies information technologies and how quickly the tools of social networking are expanding and evolving, it is premature to promote specific programs for making Web 2.0 the basis for National Security 2.0. Congress and the administration need to first lay the foundation for the broader and effective adaptation of social networking.
Social Networking and National Security: About the Moderator
James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security in the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Pol¬icy Studies, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation.
What are We to Think About What Assange Did?
This essay tries to make sense out of how to think about balancing the needs of security and liberty.
Enemies of the State and Wiki-Learned
Inept governments online is one thing. In other cases, social networking can be downright damaging to government. In 2010, the “Kneber botnet” compromised a number of government systems by gathering login credentials from social networking sites and email systems. The US government was not only one hit either, government computers in Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, were hard hit as well.
That same year a different devastating kind of damage struck when WikiLeaks, the Web site dedicated to publishing government secrets posted thousands of classified U.S. military documents related to the ongoing war strategies in Afghanistan. A few months later, WikiLeaks started an even greater firestorm when it released several hundred thousand documents of US State Departments cables detailing dealings with foreign powers. Soon thereafter when threatened with arrest, the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange promised to release even more damaging documents, dispatching encrypted files and suggesting he would provide the key to unlock them if he were incarcerated—basically threatening the United States with electronic IEDs sprinkled on the information superhighway. When several multi-national companies including MasterCard and Amazon.com severed dealings with WikiLeaks thy found themselves struck by “cyber-attacks” parties sympathetic to the Web site. Other sites struck included Visa, PayPal, Swiss bank PostFinance and the Swedish government which had initiated an unrelated sexual assault case against Julian Assange. Some of the hacktivists called themselves “Operation Payback,” who claimed they were using cyber-disobedience to defend WikiLeaks right to publish. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, some media outlets according to The Guardian, used the WikiLeaks story to launch a disinformation campaign disparaging India. “An extensive search of the WikiLeaks database by the Guardian by date, name and keyword failed to locate any of the incendiary allegations,” the paper reported, “It suggests this is the first case of WikiLeaks being exploited for propaganda purposes.” To some in the media the whole thing sounded like a cyber-civil war.
In many ways to Wiki-like war strategies over WikiLeaks was predictable. Every element of this episode from hacking into government systems to hacktivism had happened before. Still the world was stunned because it had never seen all these goings-on appear in single incident. Frankly, the world should have known better. It was only a matter of time before the world was hit by Wiki-Tsunami.
Wiki-Learned about National Security
Since 9/11, the American government had placed a premium on information-sharing, concluding that part the failure to stop the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York came from the inability of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to distribute what they knew strategies among themselves. The 9/11 Commission appointed by Congress and the President to investigate the attacks famously called it the “connect the dots” problem. A principal of intelligence security had always held that the distribution of information should be restricted to limit the possibility that secrets might be compromised. Secrets should be shared on a “need to know” basis. The imperative for post-9/11, however, held that “need to know” ought to be replaced by the “importance to share.” The WikiLeaks bonanza could well be seen as the unintended consequence of that policy. Individuals with access to vast amount of classified date could simply ship the files to WikiLeaks.
From a security stand point the WikiLeaks fiasco was definitely nothing new. Compromising classified material has always been handmaiden of war. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg who had worked on government study of the Vietnam War strategies for Rand gave 43 volumes of material he had photocopied to reporter at The York Times. The paper published excerpts of the top secret documents. Social networking today only alters the potential scale and scope of leaking. WikiLeaks is a case in point. The amount of data released and the speed with which it swirled around the world was breathtaking.
As governments put more and more of what they know online, more and more they must come to grips with the reality that what they know, even the things they don’t want the rest of us to know, could be known by anybody on the Internet—any day of the week, any hour of the day. That is just part of the reality of living in a world with online social networking. Web 2.0 may well make the legacy of first half of the 21st century be the “age of the whistleblower.”
Governments are going to have to learn how to fight back. Originally, the muckraking Web site claimed its “primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.” But clearly its mission has changed to one of embarrassing and weakening America. Dropping any pretense of trying to “expose” truly oppressive regimes such as Iran or North Korea, it now casts itself as a champion of “freedom of speech and expression.” But by publicly “expressing” a quarter-million confidential documents, WikiLeaks willfully puts at risk the lives of people working to undermine the world’s repressive regimes. Thus WikiLeaks tortures the virtue of free speech into a frontal assault on the concept of ordered liberty—far worse than the cyber version of falsely yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Lacking the resources and knowledge necessary to vet these documents, the anonymous “editors” at WikiLeaks can’t possibly ensure that their disclosures will keep innocents from harm's way. Even Amnesty International raised red flags over this cavalier disregard for human life.
Not that WikiLeaks did not have some serious defenders. There are arguments from an Ivory Tower perspective that hold unveiling classified material is actually a good thing. One favored source of inspiration for this view was the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas whose writings warned about the “threat to democracy and the public discourses upon which it depends coming both from the development of an oligopolistic capitalist market and from the development of the modern interventionist welfare state. In other words, in order to save “democracy” it is legitimate revitalize the public sphere by breaking the government’s monopoly on information. One voice that gained particular notice was blogger Aaron Bady who in the wake of the WikiLeaks earned a profile in The Atlantic. In his blog zunguzungu.wordpress.com Bady wrote, “Julian Assange and Wikileaks are unimportant compared to the larger issue they’re raising: our ‘progressive’ government’s basic antipathy to democracy, human rights, and international justice. Wikileaks has done a great deal to illuminate what our government actually does… I’m grateful for what Wikileaks has done, and I think the benefits of their leaking vastly outweigh whatever negative side-effects the leaks may eventually prove to have.” In short, Bady and others argue the pain of revelation is worth the gain of transparency.
What these arguments ignore, however, is that the creators of democratic systems in the 17thand 18th centuries understood well the importance of the public sphere, a point, in fact established by Habermas in his early writings. They knew strategies they had to create institutions that protected liberty, in part by necessitating security. The founding of the American Republic was for the purpose of constructing a political strategies system of ordered liberty. It simply cannot be right to unilaterally prefer liberty. Liberty is not an absolute value; it depends upon security (both personal and national) for its exercise. As the journalist and historian Thomas Powers wrote: “[i]n a liberal republic, liberty presupposes security; the point of security is liberty.” WikiLeaks and Bady act as if secrecy is some inherent evil. It is not.
The answer is not to solve the problem by ignoring the necessity of security, nor by allowing security concerns to run rampant without oversight, but rather by taking appropriate steps to ensure that the powers given to the executive branch are exercised thoughtfully and with care, and subject to continue review and oversight by both the judiciary and the legislative branch. This concept of checks and balances was the fundamental insight of the Framers of the Constitution—and is as applicable today as it was at the time of the Founding.
What is missing from the WikiLeaks approach is any sense of proportionality. The United States and other democracies have checks and balances from Congressional and Parliamentary committees to Inspectors Generals and Independent Prosecutors. While these systems may imperfect—what in an ordered society is? In contrast, countries like China, Iran, North Korea, and other totalitarian regimes use government not for purpose of establishing ordered liberty, but to suppress freedom. Lumping the United States with the likes of North Korea as a legitimate target for global transparency zealots just does not pass the common sense test.
Furthermore, using Habermas to justify WikiLeaks just does not cut it. Much of what Habermas wrote in the 1980s was written under the shadow of massive corporate-government structure that seemed about to overwhelm the public space in modern Germany and crowd out private individual voices. All this was before for the world of Web 2.0, which has greatly empowered private voices in public spaces. In the world of social networking, stories like the "death of Neda" created by citizen-journalists, actually drive what governments and the mainstream media talk about. Cyber-citizenry has never been more empowered. Do we really need voices like WikiLeaks which go to such enormous excess to keep governments of free societies in their place and watchdog the conventional media? I think not.
WikiLeaks has crossed the bounds of what is reasonable in a society based on the concept of ordered liberty. The issue in the cases of actions like WikiLeaks is not if they should be punished, but how. For starters, nations have laws. They should be used to the maximum extent—any ones that fit up to and including the crimes of treason and espionage, and if perpetrators are convicted and the law allows—seeking the death penalty for those convicted.
Nations ought to also shame the most serious violators, explaining the difference between “ordered freedom” and cyber-libertinism. The cyberworld relies on the wisdom of crowds to distinguish the good stuff online from the bad. Governments must convince the crowd to turn its back on actions like WikiLeaks.
There are also things not to do in the wake of incidents like WikiLeaks. Considering whom they’re aiding and abetting, it’s tempting to call such acts terrorism, but it would be mistake to put groups like WikiLeaks on the list of terrorist organizations WikiLeaks, for example, did not engage in the use or threat of violence for political strategies purposes—a defining hallmark of true terrorists. Rather than cheapen the term “terrorist,” it should be reserved for deserving groups like al Qaeda rather than preening, self-important “editors.” Likewise, cyber attacks to shut down a malpracticing Web site make no sense, either in a case where the stuff has already gone global as in the case of WikiLeaks. It is too late to close the cyber barn door. After the third batch of released documents WikiLeaks Web sites were hit with denial-of-service attacks and other cyber-strikes from unknown sources. Still, by then the damage had been done.
As WikiLeaks demonstrated, however, governments don’t appear to ready to deal with these kinds of challenges. Washington stuttered and stumbled for months as wave after wave of leaked document hit the Internet. The US government was not able at the outset of the crises to come up with the right package of measures to take WikiLeaks down. It was a cautionary tale in the reason why good governments should not be passive in how they deal with online threats.
WikiLeaks, however, is not the worst of the problem. At least when secrets are dumped online governments know where they are. Perhaps, even more damaging are when secrets are stolen and governments know nothing about the theft until after the damage is done. Again, like exposing classified information in public, robbing secrets and handing them over to enemies is nothing new. Robert Hansen, an FBI agent in charge of ferreting holes in US intelligence security spent 22 years of career turning over classified information to the Soviet Union and later Russia. Unmasked in 2001, he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of espionage. Social networking only increases the opportunities for communication between those who want to give away government information and those who want to get it. When Rossmiller ran across Ryan Anderson online in 2004, the soldier was trolling the Internet looking for an al Qaeda operative to share information with on his unit’s upcoming deployment to Iraq. He was just another online Robert Hansen-wanna be.
Web 2.0 ups the demands for government’s to conduct “counterintelligence” and information security—INFOSEC, activities that are intended to ensure classified information is not being compromised or exploited. They also have to able do damage control after the damage is done. While they try to meet these challenges, they also have to figure out how to sustain the virtues of social networking, the capacity of individuals to freely share and collaborate. Doing both—protecting information and not stifling communication is prime challenge for cyber competitors. |
| WikiLeaks, Social Networking and National Security |