Indeed, we already see signs of such investments under the umbrella of science and technology development projects. Tanzania, a former socialist country, is one of the largest recipients of Chinese foreign direct assistance. In 2007, a Chinese telecom was contacted to lay some ten thousand kilometers of fiber-optic cable. Several years later, a Chinese mining company called Sichuan Hongda announced that it had entered into a $3 billion deal with Tanzania to extract coal and iron ore in the south of the country. Shortly thereafter, the Tanzanian government announced it had entered into a loan agreement with China to build a natural-gas pipeline for $1 billion. All across the continent, similar symbiotic relationships exist between African governments and big Chinese firms, most of which are state-owned. (State-owned enterprises make up 80 percent of the value of China’s stock market.) A $150 million loan for Ghana’s e-governance venture, implemented by the Chinese firm Huawei, a research hospital in Kenya, and an “African Technological City” in Khartoum all flow from the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), a body established in 2000 to facilitate Sino-African partnerships.
In the future, superpower supplier nations will look to create their spheres of online influence around specific protocols and products, so that their technologies form the backbone of a particular society and their client states come to rely on certain critical infrastructure that the superpower alone builds, services and controls. There are currently four main manufacturers of telecommunications equipment: Sweden’s Ericsson, China’s Huawei, France’s Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco in the United States. China would certainly benefit from large portions of the world using its hardware and software, because the Chinese government has dominating influence over what its companies do. Where Huawei gains market share, the influence and reach of China grow as well. Ericsson and Cisco are less controlled by their respective governments, but there will come a time when their commercial and national interests align and contrast with China’s—say, over the abuse of their products by an authoritarian state—and they will coordinate their efforts with their governments on both diplomatic and technical levels.
These spheres of online influence will be both technical and political in nature, and while in practice such high-level relationships may not affect citizens in daily life, if something serious were to happen (like an uprising organized through mobile phones), which technology a country uses and whose sphere it’s in might start to matter. Technology companies export their values along with their products, so it is absolutely vital who lays the foundation of connectivity infrastructure. There are different attitudes about open and closed systems, disputes over the role of government, and different standards of accountability. If, for example, a Chinese client state uses its purchased technology to persecute internal minority groups, the United States would have very limited leverage: Legal recourse would be useless. This is a commercial battle with profound security implications.
The New
Code War
The logical conclusion of many more states coming online, building or buying cyber-attack capability and operating within competitive spheres of online influence is perpetual, permanent low-grade cyber war. Large nations will attack other large nations, directly and by proxy; developing nations will exploit their new capabilities to address long-standing grievances; and smaller states will look to have a disproportionately large influence, safe in the knowledge that they won’t be held accountable because of the untraceable nature of their attacks. Because most attacks will be silent and slow-moving information-gathering exercises, they won’t provoke violent retaliation. That will keep tensions on a slow burn for years to come. Superpowers will build up virtual armies within their spheres of influence, adding an important proxy layer to insulate them, and together they’ll be able to produce worms, viruses, sophisticated hacks and other forms of online espionage for commercial and political gain.
Some refer to this as the upcoming Code War, where major powers are locked in a simmering conflict in one dimension while economic and political progress continues unaffected in another. But unlike its real-world predecessor, this won’t be a primarily binary struggle; rather, the participation of powerful tech-savvy states including Iran, Israel and Russia will make it a multipolar engagement. Clear ideological fault lines will emerge around free expression, open data and liberalism. As we said, there will be little overt escalation or spillage into the physical world because none of the players would want to jeopardize their ongoing relationships.
Some classic Cold War attributes will carry over into the Code War, particularly those pertaining to espionage, because governments will largely view their new cyber-warfare capabilities as extensions of their intelligence agencies. Embedded moles, dead letter drops and other tradecraft will be replaced by worms, key-logging software, location-based tracking and other digital spyware tools. Extracting information from hard drives instead of from humans may reduce risk to traditional assets and their handlers, but it will introduce new challenges, too: Misinformation will remain a problem, and very sophisticated computers may give up secrets even less easily than people.
Another Cold War attribute—war by proxy—will see a revival in these new digital-age entanglements. On one hand, it could manifest in progressive alliances between states to counter dangerous non-state elements, where the cyber attack’s lack of attribution provides political cover. The United States could covertly fund or train Latin American governments to launch electronic attacks on drug-cartel networks. On the other hand, war by digital proxy could lead to further misdirection and false accusations, with countries exploiting the lack of attribution for their own political or economic gain.
As with the Cold War, there will be little civilian involvement, awareness or direct harm, which deleteriously affects how states perceive the risks of such activities. States with ambition but a lack of experience in cyber warfare might go too far and unintentionally start a conflict that actually does harm their populations. Eventually, mutually-assured-destruction doctrines might emerge between states that stabilize these dynamics, but the multipolarity of the landscape promises to keep some measure of volatility in the system.
More important, there will be a great deal of room for error in the new Code War. The misperceptions, misdirection and mistakes that characterized the Cold War era will reappear with vigor as all participants go through the process of learning how to use the powerful new tools at their disposal. Given the additional layer of obfuscation that cyber attacks provide, it might end up being worse than the Cold War—even exploded missiles leave trails. Mistakes will be made by governments in deciding what to target and how, by victims who out of panic or anger retaliate against the wrong party, and by the engineers who construct these massively complicated computer programs. With weapons this technically complex, it’s possible that a rogue individual would install his own back door in the program—a means of access that bypasses security mechanisms and can be used remotely—which would remain unnoticed until he decided to use it. Or perhaps a user would unknowingly share a well-constructed virus in a way its creators did not intend, and instead of skimming information about a country’s stock exchange, it would actually crash it. Or a dangerous program could be discovered that would bear several false flags (the digital version of bait) in the code, and this time the targeted country would decide to take action against the apparent source.