THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, COMMUNITY, AND VALUES
by Jeffrey Barlow <barlowj@pacificu.edu>
.01. Introduction (back to index)
With this piece we close a series of editorial analyses on the linked topics of the Internet and globalism. We have argued that the Internet and globalism are closely related developments, key factors defining the present era. One consequence of the growth of the Internet has been the emergence of a global civic culture.[1] But economic globalism does not require the Internet in its present form, and it is possible to have economic globalism, but not cultural globalism.
The impact of the Internet upon national governments can be summarized as a series of increasing limitations on state power. In a second piece we argued that the events of September 11, 2001, stem, in part, from this impact of the Internet. But the progressive loss of power by the American state was halted by those events. However, unless governmental responses are directed at the actual causes of particular problems they cannot be maximally efficient and maximally effective. If the nature of such problems as the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, and the diminishing claims of all states to citizen loyalty are indeed a consequence of globalization and the networked society, then the attempts to ameliorate the results of these changes must be directed at the causes themselves.
From the American perspective, many of the consequences of 9-11 can be summarized as problems of decreased security. We all experience our lives and our property as markedly less secure than they were on September 10, 2001. We are engaged in a passionate discussion concerning appropriate solutions. Few, if any, believe that we can restore the level of security we felt on the 10th as opposed to the 11th, and many of us probably agree that our previous feelings of security were, in any event, illusory. Here we conclude by asking a final question relating to the problems raised by globalization and the Internet: How much are we willing to pay for security?
.02. Where Were We Before 9-11? (back to index)
The world has so changed since the events of 9-11 (at least for Americans) that we might well remind ourselves what that earlier context was like. To an historian, the period from the rapid popularization of the Internet to 9-11 may one day be labeled as the interim between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the War Against Terrorism.
For many, it may simply be characterized as a world without terrifying enemies and the threat of major wars. There were conflicts, and they had their costs, but not even Desert Storm defined the era in the same way as the Cold War and the War Against Terrorism have defined theirs.
For most, however, this period was best defined by the development and rapid expansion of the Internet. Bill Gates, the dominant personality of this interim era, said of it:
Today, the Internet is … the center of attention for businesses, governments and individuals around the world. It has spawned entirely new industries, transformed existing ones, and become a global cultural phenomenon.[2]
.03. What problems did the Internet face before 9-11? (back to index)
However, even in what now seems to have been a more innocent era, there were security concerns directly related to the Internet. In 1998, F.B.I. Director Louis J. Freeh, in a report “Threats to U.S. National Security” before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on January 28, 1998, said:
The overriding concern now facing law enforcement is how rapidly the threats from terrorists and criminals are changing, particularly in terms of technology, and the resulting challenge to law enforcement’s ability to keep pace with those who wish to do harm to our nation and our nation’s citizens. This is why the encryption issue is one of the most important issues confronting law enforcement and potentially has catastrophic implications for our ability to combat every threat to national security that I am about to address in my statement here today.[3]
This threat might be summed up as the ability of terrorists and criminals to communicate without detection. Not only was the breadth of the media channels themselves an obstacle to detection, but even if detected, the messages could well prove to be unreadable due to strong encryption.
The federal government, however, had a number of tools at its disposal. One of these was a system known as “Carnivore.” Carnivore was:
A computer-based system that is designed to allow the FBI, in cooperation with an Internet Service Provider (ISP), to comply with court orders requiring the collection of certain information about emails or other electronic communications to or from a specific user targeted in an investigation.[4]
Carnivore provided law enforcement agencies with access to two functions characteristic of earlier wire-tapping in a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) electronic environment: “Trap-and-trace/pen-register” and “Content-wiretap.” The former is simply tracing electronic traffic to and from a given client of an ISP (Internet Service Provider) and keeping a register of the origin and destination of all e-mail traffic. This served the function of demonstrating in a court of law that a given individual was in contact with other given individuals; for example, that a person suspected of mafia activity indeed had communicated with known Mafiosi as demonstrated by a pen-register. The latter, as suggested by the title, was a record of the content of messages.
Both these functions, because evolutions of earlier operations in POTS environments, were well defined by law. [5] In the climate before 9-11 individual privacy rights were carefully protected so that the state was required to demonstrate compelling need to access private communications and to do so under carefully controlled and highly limited conditions. Any failure to follow the complicated legal requirements of placing a tap and keeping records resulted in the materials being inadmissible in a court, negating the whole purpose of the taps. One indication of the relative seriousness with which such taps were viewed in law was that it required the signature of a federal district court judge to place a Carnivore tap into an ISP.
So high was the concern for privacy rights within electronic environments in the period preceding 9-11 that the FBI spent a great deal of time and energy simply in explaining the system. This extended even to making electronically available an extensive document, “Independent Technical Review of the Carnivore System”.[6] This study, conducted openly by a consortium of major universities, permitted any concerned citizen to understand the nature of the technical system.
So widespread was concern over Carnivore and its possible misuses in many communities that it inspired many thousands of explanatory and cautionary web sites.[7] One can conclude then, that not only was the public interest in privacy protected by law, but that a very large community of concerned citizens had access to basic information relating to the system and its capabilities, presumably reducing the threat of its abuse.
A system about which far less was known, and one that was correspondingly more problematic for those concerned about privacy issues was “ECHELON.”[8] The Federation of American Scientists provides the following summary of ECHELON.
ECHELON is a term associated with a global network of computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted messages for pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. Every word of every message in the frequencies and channels selected at a station is automatically searched. The processors in the network are known as the ECHELON Dictionaries. ECHELON connects all these computers and allows the individual stations to function as distributed elements (of) an integrated system. An ECHELON station's Dictionary contains not only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also lists for each of the other four agencies in the UKUSA system…[9]
Because of the lack of information on ECHELON it was possible to believe almost anything about it. The system was presumed to have been created and maintained by the National Security Administration (NSA), an agency assumed to have an unlimited budget and access to emerging technologies and the best scientific minds. The NSA, moreover, has been permitted by the U.S. Congress to keep most of its operations secret, as befitting a security agency.
Concerns about ECHELON, however, tended to be more restricted than those about Carnivore, because it was presumed to be deployed abroad. Foreign nations did worry that it was used by the NSA to access proprietary commercial information that was then turned over to competing American businesses.[10] Some American civil liberties groups were concerned that oversight over its operations, whatever they were, was inadequate.
These were then the concerns of citizens as related to the Internet and the state. Compared to the terrors of the Cold War, they were relatively minor. But from the government’s point of view, there were still major areas of concern. One of these was that there were many materials transmissible over the Internet that permitted the embedding of virtually unreadable messages. The most well known of these techniques, steganography, was a means of opening up the digital code of a graphical image so as to insert encoded messages that did not itself appear in the image. These were very difficult to identify in the welter of electronic images on the World Wide Web, and even if detected, often impossible to decode.[11]
.04. What problems did 9-11 Introduce for the Internet? (back to index)
The events of September 9, 2001, have since defined much of our daily lives and particularly our political concerns. The government, for its part, had to explain a massive intelligence failure. Foreign enemies had mounted horrifyingly successful attacks, producing more American casualties on American soil in a single day than any event since the Civil War.
The Internet was quickly identified as a key element in the ability of this hidden enemy to plan, communicate, and to execute the attacks, soon defined almost universally not as a crime, but as an act of war. The War Against Terror soon followed, a war that continually expands to include other theaters, and to involve ever more actors. Even the seemingly endless and unchanging Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now dominated by the language of the War Against Terror.
We have argued in the pages of Interface that the identification of the Internet as a key factor in understanding the events of 9-11 is absolutely correct. If anything, the changes in social, political, and economic structures resultant from the impact of the Internet relate even more directly to the events of 9-11 than is generally understood.[12]
Given the manifold failure of the legal and intelligence structure before 9-11 to prevent its atrocities, Congress quickly began making sweeping changes, which may well directly affect the Internet.
To date the most important of these was the “USA PATRIOT Act “[13] The Patriot Act, passed six weeks after the events, immediately superceded a legal structure that had been decades in the making. Few, if any of its elements have been utilized in a court of law, let alone tested against constitutional protections. In addition, a number of new bureaucracies were created, such as the Office of Homeland Security headed by former Governor Tom Ridge, and the White House Office of Cyberspace Security headed by Richard Clarke, “Special Advisor to the President for Cyberspace Security.”
.05. What problems face the Internet now? (back to index)
At this point, many issues are unknown and unknowable, because we cannot foretell how the new structure created by the Patriot Act and the proliferation of security-related agencies will affect the Internet. Nor, of course, are we ourselves sure as to how it should be affected. We do not want terrorists to be able to plan additional catastrophic attacks. Neither, however, do we want to surrender our ability to communicate electronically, nor do we want to see the emerging economic model created by the Internet stifled before it can mature in order to prevent such attacks. The question, of course, is what is an appropriate middle ground: How much are we willing to pay for security?
It is clear that concerns for civil liberties and human rights, and for the freedom of the Internet community to communicate with a minimum of interference have been swept away in a tide of fear and concerns for the most basic of human rights, the right to life itself. An indication of the changes we have undergone might be this statement on the welcome or index page of “Echelonwatch” a group supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and several other watchdog groups particularly concerned about electronic freedoms:
We at EchelonWatch are deeply saddened by the terrible events of September 11. We extend our deepest sympathies to the victims and their families.
We support vigorous and appropriate actions by intelligence and law enforcement agencies to prevent more attacks from taking place. The goal of EchelonWatch is not to disband legitimate intelligence operations but to insist that they be subject to proper oversight.[14]
The apologetic tone of this introduction (although it goes on in stronger language discussing the importance of adequate protection against abuses of ECHELON) accurately conveys the environment in which we now live. Any questioning of the costs of security potentially exposes the author to immediate criticism.
Most Americans, conditioned by years of media-driven alarms about pornography on the Internet, child-abuse, cyber-stalking, electronic theft, and now, terrorists, would probably welcome just about any set of conditions intended to protect them against these threats. For example:
A Harris poll conducted in October of 2001 found that:
The provisions of the Patriot Act are far-reaching.[16] It is clear that whatever else the act may mean, Carnivore will be used much more often, and with far fewer safeguards than earlier. And the Act deliberately reduces the line between foreign and domestic intelligence gathering, making it probable that ECHELON will be used domestically if it has not been so used earlier. To say that such groups as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are very alarmed would be a considerable understatement.[17]
In addition, a climate has been created which greatly facilitates decisions that would have been unlikely in the earlier climate in which privacy concerns took precedence over security.[18] A specific example of this factor is the recent enforcement of laws prohibiting the export of so-called “strong” encryption tools. Because of the outcry from industry and the fact that it was almost impossible to prevent such exports in any event, this law had not been enforced earlier. As a result, exporters had grown cavalier about the law. Recently the State Department announced a prosecution.[19]
Although it is perhaps too early to point with alarm at the Patriot Act and accompanying changes, it is certainly appropriate to assume that the Internet and its usage will be greatly impacted.
.06. What changes to the Internet are contemplated? (back to index)
While it is very difficult to foresee what the future might hold for the Internet, the creation of current security structures has been proceeding in an orderly and highly planned way and we are probably justified in speculating that the roots of the immediate future are at least dimly visible at present.[20]
A major “National Announcement to Secure Cyberspace” is planned for the summer of 2002. The current stage of the process consists of a questionnaire “Questions to be Addressed”[21] divided into sections aimed at stakeholders such as: the home user and small business; major enterprises; the federal government; the private sector; state and local government; and higher education. Whether public opinion is in fact currently being consulted or the ground simply being laid politically for sweeping changes is impossible to know.
EDUCAUSE, “a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology”[22] is coordinating the response of the educational community to the questionnaire. Interestingly, the information technology industry was informed of these plans more than four months earlier, and began working up its responses immediately. Paul Kurtz, the Director of Critical Infrastructure Protection said in January “Much of the writing is under way now…We want a document that is largely authored by the private sector.”[23]
.07. What changes to the Internet are possible? (back to index)
The “Questions to be Addressed” hints at several possible outcomes. The present Internet, of course, has largely grown rather than being planned in any substantial fashion, and it sometimes seems that chaos and anarchy are necessarily characteristic of it. It seems to be secure from certain sorts of centralization simply because of its inchoate nature. But in “Questions to be Addressed” a number of methods are suggested whereby the government might create any sort of infrastructure it might wish with a minimum of expense:
In addition, outside the parameters of the “National Announcement to Secure Cyberspace” there are many other responses to the security issues of 9-11 that may well affect the Internet. We will take but one example here, the issue of proof or certification of individual identities. Certification of individual identities has been a continual thread running through 9-11 and its aftermath.
Many presume that secure identity systems, perhaps one based, as Oracle chairman Larry Ellison has suggested, upon computer data-base applications, would have prevented hijackers (and all other illegal aliens) from entering the country, boarding airplanes, using computers to communicate, and other essential elements of the attacks. [24]
Immediately following the attack, a Pew poll showed that 70% of those interviewed favored “Requiring that all citizens carry a national identity card at all times to show to a police officer on request.” On the other hand, this same group opposed “Allowing the U.S. government to monitor your personal telephone calls and e-mails.” by 70% to 26%. [25]
The issue of personal identity may seem largely unrelated to questions facing the Internet; it is not. One of the problems presented by the presumed terrorist use of public Internet facilities has been the inability of security forces to track usage. The new generation of electronic ID cards as used by American military forces interacts easily with a computer to not only ensure identification of users, but also triggers a secure communication protocol for electronic traffic.[26]
At the risk of being soon proven wrong, we think that this summer will see the unveiling of a number of measures that will markedly change the Internet. These changes will probably have widespread popular support, and as many economic sectors will benefit directly from them, they will also have support in such sectors, particularly in the I.T. industries.[27]
.08. What are the costs of recent changes, contemplated changes, and possible changes to the Internet and to global civic culture? (back to index)
Given the events of 9-11, certainly some consequences for the Internet are appropriate and doubtless others, appropriate or not, are inevitable. But these should be carefully considered. Considerations should include at least the following factors.
First, whatever changes the United States makes will not be made in a vacuum. Not only does the I.T. sector in the U.S. exert overwhelming influence abroad, but other countries will be quick to copy American practices, if only to be sure that they are not yielding some commercial advantage to American competitors.[28]
Another important issue is that contemplated reforms should directly address the problem that they are intended to solve. A national scheme involving electronic identification cards, for example, would in no way have prevented the 9-11 incidents as the perpetrators were in the United States quite legally.
Another issue is that the advantages of such reforms should markedly outweigh their costs. Having seen electronic counterfeiting operations at work in Thailand, Vietnam, and China, as well as earlier in Taiwan, I am not confident that such identification cards would prove to be immune to falsification. It is easy to imagine a major expense in infrastructure investments and months of attendant confusion while the United States instituted such cards and installed the necessary recognition devices. During that period, criminals as well as terrorists, will have gained access to such cards and devised imaginative new schemes to take advantage of them.
.09. Global civic culture and the Internet. (back to index)
Even if projected reforms seem likely to be successful, the attendant costs to the Internet must be carefully weighed. We have argued earlier that the Internet is the primary engine behind the development of an international shared culture dealing with issues such as democracy and human rights, a complex of values that fully merits the term “global civic culture.” It seems probable that one victim of major changes in the Internet could well be the emerging global civic culture.
A concern for this civic culture, we believe, is more than just a human rights issue. It is also an economic one; an open system of digital communications may well be critical to the emergence of a true electronic economy. In addition, some have argued, it is vital to American power.[29] The example of American openness and our championing of open societies will be much impacted by extreme security measures that limit the reach of the Internet, or access to it. Such changes to the Internet would reflect, in my opinion, a radical shift in the American identify, both internally and externally: from a society which has seen the issue of democratization and the opening of societies and economies in a globalizing process as the central agenda, to one where security concerns are dominant.
China is a useful example here in that it illustrates internally some of the same excitement about the Internet that we have seen in the United States, both as a tool for individual education and enlightenment, as well as one for social, economic, and political reform. But it is also a highly centralized society with a one-party government that makes stability and security its primary concern.
China has benefited greatly from the War on Terrorism in that concern for the rights of Chinese minority groups, whether political ones, religious ones, or ethnic ones, has just about dropped off the screen in Washington. Additionally, the Chinese government has acquired a whole new vocabulary with which to defend its internal practices. What earlier were to many observers violations of minority rights are now arguably campaigns against global terror.[30]
Now it seems possible that the American Internet could well look like the Chinese one: a carefully controlled and monitored network where security takes priority over access. In my opinion, if this occurs it would be too high a price to pay for security.
.10. Notes (back to index)
[1] See Barlow, Jeffrey G. “ Globalism and the Internet” Editorial Essay, The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet, February 2002. <http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2002/01/editorial01.php > Accessed April 13, 2002.
[2] Gates, Bill jr. “Shaping the Internet Age”, Internet Policy Institute, http://www.internetpolicy.org/briefing/current.html
[3] Freeh, Louis J. Statement for the Record, “Threats to U.S. National Security”. < http://www.infowar.com/civil_de/civil_022798B.html-ssi > Accessed April 13, 2002.
[4] “Carnivore FAQ” <http://www.robertgraham.com/pubs/carnivore-faq.html> Accessed April 13, 2002.
[5] The relevant laws were Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (as amended) (known familiarly as Title III and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (as amended), known familiarly as the ECPA. See “Statement for the Record of Donald M. Kerr, Assistant Director, Laboratory Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation on “Internet and Data Interception Capabilities Developed by FBI” before the U.S. House of representatives Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on the Constitution. < http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress00/kerr072400.htm > Accessed April 13, 2002.
[6] Available on line at < http://www.epic.org/privacy/carnivore/#documents > Accessed April 13, 2002
[7] A highly restricted Google search done on April 13, 2002, “Carnivore and FBI” turned up 35,200 sites.
[8] The most authoritative recent report on ECHELON would seem to be that of the European Parliament’s Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System, approved September 5, 2001. PDF available at http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/rapport_echelon_en.pdf Accessed April 13, 2002.
[9] http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/echelon.htm Accessed April 13, 2002
[10] See: Caizares, Alex. “Europeans Irked Over Orbital Snooping.” < http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2000/02/000228-echelon2.htm > Accessed April 13, 2002
[11] Kolata, Gina. “Veiled Messages of Terrorists May Lurk in Cyberspace.” The New York Times, October 30, 2001. < http://www.nytimes.com/2001/20/30/physical/30steg.html >
Accessed October 31, 2001.
[12] See. Barlow, Jeffrey G "Netwar" at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2001/10/editorial10.php ; "Netwar and Cyberwar” http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2001/11/editorial11.php; RNetwar, Bin Laden, and Al Quaeda” December 2001. http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2001/12/edit1201.php Accessed April 13, 2002
[13] “USA PATRIOT Act Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (Oct. 25, 2001)” Available at the Electronic Frontier Foundation <http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Terrorism_militias/hr3162.php> Accessed April 13, 2002.
[14] Echelonwatch, Administered by the ACLU in conjunction with Cyber-Rights and Cyber-Liberties (UK) and the Omega Foundation. < http://www.echelonwatch.org/ > Accessed April 13, 2002.
[15] Schwartz, John. “Seeking Privacy Online, Even as Security Tightens.” The New York Times, November 11,2001. < http:://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/technology/11soft.html > Accessed November 11, 2001.
[16] Under Title I of the Act, of the six sections, two deal directly with electronic issues (Sec. 103; Sec. 105.) Title II is “Enhanced Surveillance Procedures: and any one of its 25 sections could directly impact the Internet as we currently know it. Available at: http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html Accessed April 13, 2002.
[17] See their analysis at “EEF Analysis of the Provision of the USA Patriot Act” at http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Terrorism/20011031_eff_usa_patriot_analysis.php Accessed April 14, 2002.
[18] See for example: Federal Communications Commission, Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, CC Docket No. 97-213, April 11, 2002 available at http://cryptome.org/ Accessed April 14, 2002.
[19] U.S. Department of State, International Information Programs, 21 February 2002 “Commerce Dept. Fines Firm for Illegal Export of Encryption Software” http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/02022503.htm Accessed April 14, 2002.
[20] See for example “The Race to Secure
Cyberspace Richard Clarke, Bush's new Net security chief, discusses efforts
(not easy or cheap) to protect America from digital destroyers”
Business Week Online, December 6, 2001. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/
dec2001/tc2001126_9530.htm Accessed April 13, 2002
[21] See “A National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace” Questions to Be Addressed, PDF available at: http://www.gcn.com/cybersecurity/breakout3pgs.pdf Accessed April 14, 2002.
[22] “About Educause”. http://www.educause.edu/defined.html Accessed April 13, 2002. The current membership comprises more than 1,800 colleges, universities, and education organizations, including over 180 corporations. It is arguably the largest and most well organized of such groups in education. Accessed April 14, 2002.
[23] See Jackson, William. “White House seeks industry’s ‘good ideas’” Government Computer News, 01/28/02 http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/17839-1.html Accessed April 13, 2002.
[24] See Scheeres, Julia. “ID Cards are de Rigueur Worldwide” WiredNews September 25, 2001. http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47073,00.html See: Ellison, Larry. "Digital IDs Can Help Prevent Terrorism" “The Wall Street Journal”, October 8, 2001 http://www.oracle.com/corporate/index.html?digitalid.html Accessed April 14, 2002.
[25] See http://people-press.org/reports/print.php3?PageID=32 accessed April 13, 2002
[26] See O'Harrow, Robert Jr., and Jonathan Krim “A Changed America: Privacy National ID Card Gaining Support” The Washington Post, December 17, 2001 Page A01 http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/access/... Accessed April 14, 2002.
[27] See, for example, TRW chairman Philip A
Odeen’s remarks in February to Chicago area business leaders at CNNMONEY,
“Technology the Key to Homeland Defense, TRW Chairman Odeen Tells Chicago
Executives' Club” Feb.21, 2002, at: http://money.cnn.com/services/tickerheadlines/prn/en-
clth015.P1.02212002123230.14817.htm Accessed April 14, 2002.
[28] See for example the council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/WhatYouWant.asp?NT=185 See also the Center for Democracy and Technology “International Issues: Cybercrime” at http://www.cdt.org/international/cybercrime/
[29] See Barlow, Jeffrey G. “American Power, Globalism, and the Internet” The Journal of Education, Community, and Values: Interface on the Internet, March 2002. http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2002/03/editorial.php Accessed April 14, 2002.
[30] See for example, “’East Turkistan’ An Integral part of Bin Laden’s Terrorist Forces,” Beijing Review, Vol. 45, no. 5, January 31, 2002. pp. 14-23. This article places Chinese security measures against minority ethnic groups in Muslim areas of China into the context of a world campaign against terrorism.
Michael R. Steele - Resources and Information for teachers on Holocaust...
Marshall Poe - Do We Need the UP? A New Model for Scholarly Publishing...
Stephen Gance - Are constructivism and computer-based learning...
Mark Szymanski - Workshop Resources for Challenging Bias
Jesse Snyder - All about Bulletin Boards
Hubert L. Dreyfus's On The Internet
Bernardo A. Huberman's The Laws of the Web: Patterns In The Ecology Of...
Globalism and the Internet: How Much Are We Willing to Pay for Security?