Borderless
Mark Stafford
Proven Cyber Security Excellence and Experience | Proven Business Success | Exceptional Person Green Card Holder
One of the most clichéd statements in cyber security today is "there is no perimeter". And its true to a point, the point is its not fixed, its fuzzy and it can sometimes only be defined for a moment of a transaction. The idea its just identity is peddled by those who ignore that even our personality and identity change to suit our needs and/or the transaction we are performing.
The concept of no border is interesting in Geopolitical terms, especially with world politics as they are now.
"When I were a lad" back in the 20th century, in the UK we had three TV channels to get our "information", a local library, school and elders/peers. The latter were not always reliable, but their gossip and "fake news" would stay in a small community.
Generally the "elite" controlled the media, or at least the political agenda, and a cultural norm/idea stayed within a political border. In fact in the old communist states, it was absolute. The BBC, the bastion of free speech, was banned.
As the walls came down, due in some part to ideology being able to leap over those borders, through media (in the case of Romania the TV series Dallas was quite a influence on the public), those borders started to dissipate. Countries cooperated and joined, satellite TV became "pan continental" and the internet was born.
This meant a borderless place existed to communicate in all but the countries that could, and still do, block access to it. Messages got beyond physical communities to virtual ones.
With geopolitical borders redrawn, and blocks of countries sharing trade and government we globalized everything to such an extent, that people felt they lost their identity, ironic in a cyber world where you can create your own.
And therefore Cyber became a voice for anyone. We went from viral cat videos, to "Fake News". That same gossip that would have stayed in and only plagued a local community, could garner a larger audience of "me too" people even if it was founded on no facts. Social Media gave rise to misfits, angry people and wanna-be's to say whatever they like.
And what happened in response? Our geo-Political borders are being rebuilt. People are separating based on a sense of belonging to their community again, even if actually their community wasn't physically in their locale. The "elite" got their come uppence, and the man with the loud voice found an audience, and a vote, and a place to stand.
So where does this leave us? It leaves us with a free space of transactions and thoughts, across a borderless space, that can clarion call anyone to a cause, but physically we may never meet those, or chose to live with those people we call to it. In fact often we use people "somewhere else" to justify other people should be "somewhere else".
The "elite" often point to the fact it is the fault of social media and most of the activity that drives this physical isolation but cyber inclusion is illegal. It is not. That’s typical of those who have not adapted that information, and therefore a voice, can reach more people in a second than it ever has. It can drive illegal activities, but it can also drive a movement and it is for those of us who want to rail against these threats to enlightenment, free speech and democracy to us the same media, not in an entitled way, but how gossip used to be broken. Through real facts.
As Cyber Security professionals we know that the criminals take advantage of these gossip communities and monetize them either through ransomware or click bait. They also create web sites which spread malware to DDoS other interests and communities they don't like, leading to a war of ideals across that borderless world. Faceless, but loud.
It is therefore for us to be part of this debate, and a debate is needed, because right now it happening around us and the "old guard" who do not understand the consequences are letting it happen (and in some cases taking advantage of it!)
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The opinion expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employers past or present, or any professional bodies that I am a member of. My views are also deliberately designed to create debate where thought leadership and debate are required.
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CyberFlaneur. Attorney, journalist, writer, media producer, and technology tart. We can only see what we think is possible. Me? A weapon of mass instruction because knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.
7 年Neal Rauhauser Excellent, excellent share. As is the piece Charles M. has noted in his response. The piece by Stafford picks up many themes in David Goodhart's new book "The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics", especially Stafford's comment about the "somewhere else" people. Facebook, etc. What went mainstream as a friendly place for loved ones to swap baby pictures and cat videos has morphed into an opaque and poorly understood metropolis rife with influence peddlers determined to manipulate what we know and how we think. We have barely begun to understand how the massive social network shapes our world. I maintain that the U.S. will NOT recover from any of this: Trump, fake news, the Russians … all of it. It is closing time in the gardens of the West. The wails that have rent the air since the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory rise from the same parts of Anglo-America that hosted, post-1989, the noisiest celebrations of liberalism, democracy, free markets and globalization ... and of recent note, the glories of AI. To borrow a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre the West is "springing leaks everywhere". As I have written before, no country has even come close to the U.S. in harnessing the power of computer networks to create and share knowledge, produce economic goods, intermesh private and government computing infrastructure including telecommunications and wireless networks, using all manner of technologies to carry data and multimedia communications, and control all manner of systems for our power energy distribution, transportation, manufacturing, etc. … and so has left the U.S. as the most vulnerable technology ecosystem to those who can steal, corrupt, harm, and destroy public and private assets, at a pace often found unfathomable.