2015-04-10 update: Citizen Lab published adetailed report of“China’s Great Cannon”, used in the attacks against GitHub and GreatFire.org.
This week my friends at GitHub are enduring an overwhelming distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS),which comes to them directly from the systems and networks of theGreat Firewall of China. Theevidence of what’s occurring and where it’s coming from are incontrovertible.What’s murky is what this attack means for the future of nations.
Historian Barbara Tuchman, in her excellent book “The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam”, opened my eyes to the extraordinary innovation of“the state” as against its precursors “the family”, “the tribe”, “thefaith”, and so on. Other innovations, such as freedom and justice thatdid not have to come from the barrel of a gun, were the result ofmankind’s ability, through the innovation of “the state”, to make commoncause at scale. That scalable common cause has in turn been the keystoneof progress in the arts and in the sciences for at least the lastthousand years or so.
The Role of Nations in Humanity’s Future is Unclear
The Internet has a way of disrupting things. So it is with the role ofnations. Before the Internet, it would have been an act of war for asovereign country to project force inside another country with thedeliberate intent and effect of harming an individual or a corporation.And where kinetic force is involved, that expectation still holds. Butif the force projected is entirely within the Internet, it’s “the newnormal.” This “new normal” confounds because so much of humanity’sactivities now take place within the Internet or at the very least arecarried or delivered by the Internet.
What this means for the role of nations in humanity’s future is unclear.Society is no longer based on geography — it’s possible to make commoncause with large numbers of people we don’t live close to, but the lawsand customs and taxes of where we each live still dominate our affairs.And no matter how many Facebook friends we might have, or how manylike-minded fellow travelers we share our thoughts with, the Internetexperience does not yet translate into the same scale of common cause anation of millions or perhaps hundreds of millions or billions ofpeople, sharing a food supply, defended by navies and armies.
It’s not the first time that the Internet has begun to make obsolete ordisrupt an old way of doing things without yet having developed anypractical new ways of doing those same things. Bitcoin, for example,offers an alternative to fiat currencies, but does not offer a tool tonational governments similar to the control over the money supply orforeign exchange. Some Bitcoin proponents say that this is all fine bythem, but since I know that national governments are going to be hell-benton having tools like this, a future with Bitcoin is an uncertainone — while we figure out what will replace currency as a tool ofnational policy.
Many argue that the era of nations is passing, and that the need fornations in the future is at best unclear. Certainly there are plentyexamples of national power being abused, leading to the death of manymillions of people throughout history. Even the United States whichlikes to see itself as the paragon of governance “of the people, by thepeople, and for the people” has a record of corruption, abuse, and evilboth within and outside its borders that’s comparable to other nationswhose slogans are not so fanciful. As Barbara Tuchman wrote [Ibid],
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place orperiod is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their owninterests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of governmentthan of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, whichmay be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience,common sense and available information, is less operative and morefrustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so oftenact contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interestsuggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not tofunction?
To those who ponder a future without nations, be aware that a nation isamong other things both sword and shield to a population at scale, andthat as long as there is even one nation, we will all live in nations. Ijust can’t see how a bunch of post-nationalists or anarchists living inpeace without societal structure would be able to arm themselves againsta organized nations who believed — for whatever reason, and rightly orwrongly — that all people on earth should live as they live, worshipas they worship, pay the taxes they pay, or subscribe to the same visionof humanity’s future as they do.
Why Society Loses When Nation-States Play Power Games
So, last year it was revealed that the United States had been tappinginto, and tampering with, China’s three largest mobile phone carriers.This may be China’s justification for attacking GitHub this week:perhaps the message is, “as ye sow, so shall ye reap.” If so, thiscreates some concerns for me, because for every move, there is acountermove, and in matters of sovereignty, it’s essential to berespected. Historically, these power games end when society itself losesthe capacity for further struggle. I would prefer that we decide,rationally, in mutual self interest, on an enforceable end state, andthen adopt it.
And in any case I see a larger question as salient: what is the futureof nations, if now that we have the Internet, the common cause we makeat scale to create “a state” does not include the common defense oflife, liberty, or property from powers foreign or domestic? As adistributed systems technologist, I aver that there is no such thing assecurity at scale, that any system that has humans in it will beextremely unreliable, and that what China’s LU Wei calls “InternetSovereignty” cannot be assured among connected nations. Will theInternet teach us that human society cannot survive without closed borders?
As CEO of an Internet security company, I am expected to take sides, andI have. I side with privacy over surveillance, I side with safety overfear, and I side with the economics of peace over the economics of war.Farsight Security has no offensive products or services, we are entirelydefensive. We collect no personally identifiable information, thus our services cannot be used for surveillance.And I’ll tell that to the people who built China’s GreatFirewall and gave it the ability to insert offense-minded Javascript inplace of benign analytics, for the purpose of attacking my friends atGitHub, who see it as their duty to host Open Source Software withouteditorializing as to whether two of their many clients (greatfire andcn-nytimes) ought to be allowed to publish what is clearly Open Source work.
For the United States, and China, and all other nations now using orcontemplating the use of the Internet as a loophole around internationallaw and treaty conventions, allowing a nation to project force intoanother nation, targeting individuals or corporations or even governmentassets, all without the inconvenience of declaring war and with theexpressed hope of not having the other guys declare war either — becareful what you wish for. Not just because we all live in glass housesand you shouldn’t therefore throw stones, but because nations exist fora reason, and if we take that reason away, the resulting instabilitywill certainly be called Folly, no matter who wins or loses in the shortterm.
Dr. Paul Vixie is the CEO of Farsight Security, Inc.
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