When not engaged in marketing wars, groups in conflict will attack whatever online entities they deem valuable to the other side. This means targeting the websites, platforms and communications infrastructure that have some strategic or symbolic importance with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, sophisticated viruses and all other types of cyber warfare. Online attacks will become an integral part of the tactical strategy for groups in conflict, from the lowest intensity fight to full-fledged warfare. Attacking or incapacitating a rival group’s communications network will not only interfere with its digital marketing abilities but will also affect its access to resources, information and its support base. Once a network or database has been successfully compromised, the infiltrating group can use the information they gathered to stay informed, spread misinformation, launch preemptive attacks and even track high-value targets (if, for example, a group found the mobile number for regime officials and had monitoring software that revealed their locations).
Virtual attacks will happen independently and in retaliation. In a civil war, for example, if one side loses territory to the other, it might retaliate by bringing down its rival’s propaganda websites so as to limit its ability to brag about the victory—not an equivalent gain, of course, but damaging nonetheless. This is the virtual-world version of bombing the ministry of information, often one of the first targets in a physical-world conflict. A repressive government will be able to locate and disable the online financial portals that revolutionaries in the country are using to receive funds from supporters in the diaspora. Hackers sympathetic to one side or the other will take it upon themselves to dismantle whatever they can reach: YouTube channels run by their adversaries, databases relevant to the other side. When NATO began its military operations in Serbia in 1999, pro-Serbian hackers targeted public websites for both NATO and the U.S. Defense Department, with some success. (NATO’s public-affairs website for Kosovo was “virtually inoperable” for days as a result of the attacks, which also seriously clogged the organization’s e-mail server.)
In the coming decades, we’ll see the world’s first “smart” rebel movement. Certainly, they’ll need guns and manpower to challenge the government, but rebels will be armed with technologies and priorities that dictate a new approach. Before even announcing their campaign, they could target the government’s communications network, knowing it constitutes the real (if not official) backbone of the state’s defense. They might covertly reach out to sympathetic governments to acquire the necessary technical components—worms, viruses, biometric information—to disable it, from within or without. A digital strike against the communications infrastructure would catch the government off guard, and as long as the rebels didn’t “sign” their attack, the government would be left wondering where it came from and who was behind it. The rebels might leave false clues as to the origin, perhaps pointing to one of the state’s external enemies, to confuse things further. As the state worked to get itself back online, the rebels might strike again, this time infiltrating the government’s Internet and “spoofing” identities (tricking the network into believing the infiltrators are legitimate users) to further disorient and disrupt the network processes. (If the rebels gained access to an important biometric database, they could steal the identities of government officials and impersonate them online, making false statements or suspicious purchases.) Finally, the rebels could target something tangible, like the country’s power grids, the manipulation of which would generate public outcry and blame, incorrectly aimed at the government. Thus the smart rebel movement could, with three digital strikes and no shots fired, find itself uniquely poised to mobilize the masses against a government that wasn’t even aware of a domestic rebellion. At this point, the rebels could begin their military assault and open a second, physical front.
Conflicts in the future will also be influenced by two distinct and largely positive trends that stem from connectivity: first, the wisdom of the online crowd, and second, the permanence of data as evidence, which we alluded to earlier as making it harder for perpetrators of violence to deny or minimize their crimes.
Collective wisdom on the Internet is a controversial subject. Many decry the negative extremes of online collaboration, such as the aggressive mediocrity of the “hive mind” (the collective consensus of groups of online users) and the viciousness of anonymity-fueled pack behavior on forums, social networks and other online channels. Others champion the level of accuracy and reliability of crowd-sourced information platforms like Wikipedia. Whatever your view, there are potential gains that collective wisdom can bring to future conflict.
With a more level playing field for information in a conflict, a greater number of citizens can participate in shaping the narratives that emerge. Widespread mobile-phone usage will ensure that more people know what’s going on inside a country than did in earlier times, and Internet connectivity extends that sphere of engagement to a broad range of outside actors. On balance, there are always more people on the side of good than on the side of the aggressors. With an engaged population, there is greater potential for citizen mobilization against injustice or propaganda: If enough people are angry with what they see, they’ll have channels through which they can make their voices heard, and can act individually or collectively—even if, as we saw in Singapore, the anger is over the cooking of curry.
The challenges of governing the Internet also allow for the danger of online vigilantism, as the story of China’s “human-flesh search engines” (renrou sousuo yinqing) shows. According to Tom Downey’s revealing March 2010 article in The New York Times Magazine, some years ago a disturbing trend emerged in China’s online space, where volumes of Internet users would locate, track down and harass individuals who had earned their collective wrath. (There is no central platform for this work, nor is the trend limited to China, but the phenomenon is most widely known and understood there, thanks to a series of high-profile examples.) In 2006, a gruesome video circulated on Chinese Internet forums depicting a woman stomping a kitten to death with her high-heeled shoes, leading to a countrywide search for the stomper. Through diligent crowd-sourced detective work, the perpetrator was soon tracked to a small town in northeastern China, and after her name, phone number and employer were made public, she fled, as did her cameraman. It’s not just computers that can find needles in haystacks, apparently; locating this woman among more than one billion Chinese—through only the clues in the video—took just six days.
This kind of mob behavior can veer into unpredictable chaos, but that does not mean attempts to harness its collective power for good should be abandoned. Imagine if the end goal of the Chinese users was not to harass the kitten-stomper but to bring her to justice through official channels. In a conflict scenario, where institutions have broken down or are not trusted by the population, crowd-sourced energy will help to produce more comprehensive and accurate information, help track down wanted criminals and create demand for accountability even in the most difficult circumstances.
But the importance and utility of crowd-sourced justice pales in comparison to the other modern development: data permanence. The exposure of atrocities in real time and in front of a global audience is vital, as is permanently storing it and making it searchable for everyone who wants to refer to it (for prosecutions, legislation or later study). Governments and other aggressors may have the military advantage with guns, tanks and planes, but they’ll be fighting an uphill battle against the information trail they leave behind. If a government attempts to block citizen communications, it may be able to stifle some of the evidence flowing through and out of the country, but the flow will continue. More important, the presence of this evidence, even if disputed at the time, will affect how the conflict is handled, resolved and considered well into the future.