1820s Britain faced a crisis. Innovations in transportation, communications and manufacturing disrupted artisan industries and traditional occupations. A poor understanding of new industrial economy led to overproduction, bank failures, factory closures and very quickly, riots in all the major cities. A revolution was in prospect because the British system of government, suited to slow additive rate of change of the rural agrarian economy of a century earlier, was unequal to managing the rapid change accompanying the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution was threatened by civil disorders arising from its early success. It went on to become wildly successful, and political revolution was avoided because the British reorganized their system of government using the methods, procedures and principles of the enlightenment scientific project which had given rise to it.
Today the United States faces a similar problem. The deep integration of computational and networking technology into every area of human endeavor has resulted in a supercharged scientific, economic and industrial environment unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. Things don’t seem to happen faster than they used to, they do happen faster than they used to.
We need to adapt, quickly.
PRIORITY: THE INTERNET
Powerful new technologies like the internet are accompanied by great dangers. Sometimes we know in advance what those dangers are. Often those hazards become evident only after the technology is in use. Scientists call such unforeseen unexpected qualities “emergent dangers.”
The most powerful transformative technology of all time, the internet, has made us richer, healthier, better educated, better fed, more peaceful and longer-lived than at any previous time in our history, and now threatens to destroy us.
Our civilization is entirely, utterly and irreversibly dependent on the insecure, anonymous internet, and the internet is failing.
Our email system is flooded with malware, phishing emails and criminal scams in profusion. Remote access trojans, key loggers and ransomware are packed in popular gaming apps and users tricked into downloading them from legitimate websites. Text messages, phone calls, and email spam offer endless, ingenious scams and swindles. Fake web sites purport to be banks, stock brokers or trusted merchants to collect our credentials. Gangs of con artists use stolen data to credibly impersonate IRS agents, file our taxes to collect refunds, apply for credit or terrify and extort unwary or intimidated victims. Phony tech support scams install malware, charging hundreds of dollars for doing so. Skimmers in ATMs and trojans in point of sale terminals steal our credit and debit card information and associated PIN numbers. Personal data or email correspondence is stolen and used to blackmail political parties, government employees and individuals in sensitive positions. Corporate data is held for ransom, and lately, frequently destroyed, even after the ransom is paid.
The internet grew from a small town with a population of scientists and academic researchers to a worldwide megalopolis, home to the most ruthless and capable criminals on earth. Anonymous, insecure networking has permitted disastrous manipulations of popular opinion, allowed sophisticated disinformation operations conducted by nation states and criminal interests to confuse, mislead and enrage US citizens, institutions and our elected representatives. The pillaging of businesses, individuals and governments by nation state criminal organizations is ongoing and described in comprehensive detail in Samantha Ravitch and Juan Zarate’s treatise, Cyber Enabled Economic Warfare .
Nobody foresaw the consequences of insecure, anonymous networking. Only over the last three years has it become incontrovertibly evident that our best combination of defensive technologies is no longer able to keep pace with the offensive innovations in crimeware produced by nation state/criminal collaborations.
The inherent, irremediable insecurity of anonymous networking means we must engineer and adopt a new networking framework which will change the way the internet functions.
Secure Identity Based Networking is fundamental to the management of exponential change and necessary to the reestablishment of US democracy.
The ideas that powered the English industrial revolution were the same that guided the Enlightenment Scientific Project, the most fruitful collective endeavor in human history. These were the same ideas whose application to the political system permitted it to rapidly adapt. As much the technology, it was the optimism which imbued the scientific project and embodied in its leading proponent Charles Babbage who inspired government and people with the courage and confidence to adapt. That enlightenment spirit still exits, summarized by the physicist David Deutsch.
“There are always problems. All problems are soluble.”