China is by no means the only state unwilling or unable to enforce international intellectual-property norms. Russia, India and Pakistan have all been singled out for their equally dismal enforcement of these laws. Israel and Canada aren’t normally considered hotbeds of copyright infringement, but neither country has fully implemented the standards and laws of the WIPO, making them a haven for Internet piracy. And within the group of states that do have strong protections for intellectual-property rights, there are usually significant and exploitable differences in interpretation. For example, the notion of fair use (as the United States terms it) or fair dealing (as the British do), which allows for the limited use of copyrighted material without consent from the copyright holder, is far more tightly controlled in the European Union than it is in either the United States or the United Kingdom.
Virtual Statehood
One of our recurring themes is that in the virtual world, size matters less. Technology empowers all parties, and allows smaller actors to have outsized impacts. And those actors need not be known or official. To wit, we believe it’s possible that virtual states will be created and will shake up the online landscape of physical states in the future.
There are hundreds of active violent and nonviolent secessionist movements in the world today, and this is unlikely to change in the future. A large portion of the movements are motivated by perceived ethnic or religious discrimination, and shortly we will discuss how physical discrimination and persecution of these groups will play out online, changing shape but not intent. In the physical world, it’s not uncommon for persecuted groups to be subject to different laws and vulnerable to indeterminate detention, extrajudicial killings, the absence of due process, and all manner of restrictions on their civil and human liberties, and most of these tactics will find their way online, aided significantly by technology that helps regimes monitor, harass and target their restive minority populations.
Hounded in both the physical and virtual worlds, groups that lack formal statehood may choose to emulate it online. While not as legitimate or useful as actual statehood, the opportunity to establish sovereignty virtually could prove to be, in the best cases, a meaningful step toward official statehood, or in the worst cases, an escalation that further entrenches both sides in a messy civil conflict. The Kurdish populations in Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq—the four countries where they are most concentrated—might build a Kurdish web as a way to carve out a sort of virtual independence. Iraqi Kurdistan is already quasi-autonomous, so the efforts could begin there. Kurds could establish a top-level domain (e.g., www.yahoo.com.krd), with “krd” standing for Kurdistan, by registering a new domain and basing the servers in a neutral or supportive country. Then they’d build upon that.
Virtual statehood would be much more than just a gesture and a domain name. Additional projects could also develop a distinct Kurdish presence online. With enough effort, the Kurdish web could become a robust version of other countries’ Internet, in the Kurdish language, of course. From there, Kurdish or sympathetic engineers could build applications, databases and other online destinations that not only support the Kurdish cause but actually facilitate it. The virtual Kurdish community could hold elections and set up ministries to deliver basic public goods. They could even use a unique online currency. The virtual minister of information would manage the data flow to and from the online Kurdish “citizens.” The minister of the interior would focus on preserving the security of the virtual state and protecting it from cyber attack. The foreign minister would engage in diplomatic relations with other, actual states. The economic and trade minister would promote e-commerce between Kurdish communities and outside economic interests.
Just as secessionist efforts to move toward physical statehood are typically resisted strongly by the host state, such groups would face similar opposition to their online maneuvers. The creation of a virtual Chechnya might cement ethnic and political solidarity among its supporters in the Caucasus region, but it would no doubt worsen relations with the Russian government, which would consider such a move a violation of its sovereignty. The Kremlin might well respond to virtual provocation with a physical crackdown, rolling in tanks and troops to quell the stirrings in Chechnya.
For the Kurds, who stretch across several countries, this risk would be even more pronounced, as a Kurdish virtual-statehood campaign would be met with resistance from the entire neighborhood, some of whom lack Kurdish populations but would fear a destabilizing effect. No effort would be spared to destroy the Kurdish virtual institutions through low-grade cyber-meddling and espionage, like cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and infiltration. The populations on the ground would surely bear the brunt of the punishment. The governments would be aided, of course, by the massive amounts of data that these citizens produced, so finding the people involved or supportive of virtual statehood would be easy. Very few secessionist movements have the level of resources and international support that would be required to match this level of counterattack.
Declaring virtual statehood would become an act of treason, not just in restive regions but almost everywhere. It’s simply too risky an avenue to leave open. The concept of virtual institutions alone could breathe new life into secessionist groups that have tried and failed to produce concrete outcomes through violent means, like the Basque separatists in Spain, the Abkhaz nationalists in Georgia or the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines. One failed or unsuitable effort could also break the experiment altogether. If, for example, the lingering supporters of the Texas secession movement rallied together to launch a virtual Republic of Texas, and they were met with derision, the concept of virtual statehood might be sullied for some time. How successful these virtual statehood claims would be (what would constitute success, in the end?) remains to be seen, but the fact that this will be feasible says something significant about the diffusion of state power in the digital age.
Digital Provocation and
Cyber War
No discussion on the future of connected states would be complete without a look at the worst things they’ll do to each other: namely, launch cyber wars. Cyber warfare is not a new concept, nor are its parameters well established. Computer security experts continue to debate how great the threat is, what it looks like and what actually constitutes an act of cyber war. For our purposes, we’ll use the definition of cyber warfare offered by the former U.S. counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke: actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption.4
Cyber attacks—including digital espionage, sabotage, infiltration and other mischief—are, as we established earlier, very difficult to trace and have the potential to inflict serious damage. Both terrorist groups and states will make use of cyber-war tactics, though governments will focus more on information-gathering than outright destruction. For states, cyber war will primarily meet intelligence objectives, even if the methods employed are similar to those used by independent actors looking to cause trouble. Stealing trade secrets, accessing classified information, infiltrating government systems, disseminating misinformation—all traditional activities of intelligence agencies—will make up the bulk of cyber attacks between states in the future. Others fundamentally disagree with us on this point, predicting instead that states will seek to destroy their enemies by heavy-handed methods like cutting off power grids remotely or crashing stock markets. In October 2012, the U.S. secretary of defense, Leon Panetta, warned, “An aggressor nation … could use these kinds of cyber tools to gain control of critical switches. They could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with chemicals. They could contaminate the water supply in major cities, or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.” We tend to take the optimist’s perspective (at least when it comes to states) and say that such escalations, while possible, are highly unlikely, if only because the government that first starts this trend would itself become a target as well as set a precedent that even the most erratic regimes would be cautious to approach.