Cyber Space: A New Dimension of Power

Across time and space, introduction of new technologies has massive unintended consequences, changing the course of human civilization. From the first agricultural societies, around 8000 BC, to the development of the steam engine, these technological advancements were evolutionary responses to the opportunities and threats of the time. The ongoing information revolution is one such technological advancement that is buffeting the existing super and sub-structures of the society. Never before in the history of mankind, the flow of information has been this fast and has led to unprecedented democratization in terms of knowledge sharing. The advanced pace of the information revolution has hinged on the proliferation of cyberspace; the origins of which can be traced back to the development of the ARPANET project, at the US Department of Defense (DOD). The original mandate of the project was to develop a defense communication network.However, ARPANET morphed into an epoch making development that has had far-reaching consequences with spillovers into economic, political, and social spheres.

While transfer of power has taken place in human history usually through violent means, cyberspace has facilitated diffusion of power in a non-violent manner. The actors that have been empowered by cyberspace include a whole gamut of non-state actors from the private sector, civil society organizations that work towards the betterment of the society to terrorist outfits that use cyberspace to wreak havoc. These actors wield ‘cyber power’. States whether democratic or authoritarian are haggling through dialogue, in case of democratic states, or repression, in case of authoritarian states, to cope with the changes in power dynamics ushered in by cyberspace. Though to be fair, the state is still a dominant actor in every sphere of the body politic and wields the maximum amount of cyber power.

Elements of Cyber Power and the actors involved Power can be simply defined as the ability to influence others to get the outcome one wants. By extension, cyber power is the ability to influence outcomes within and beyond cyberspace. Before understanding the nuances of cyber power, it is essential to understand basic features of cyberspace because those form the underlying foundations of cyber power: • low cost of entry

• low barriers to entry

• high speed information transfer

• high degree of anonymous access

The above mentioned features of cyberspace provide the relevant underpinnings for cyber power to be a potent force. A logical deduction that flows is that cyberspace is closely associated with egalitarian access at low or no cost to the user. However, the magnitude of cyber power commanded by different actors varies on the basis of material and non material resources at their disposal. Cyber power, like all the other forms of power, isn’t exercised in a vacuum; it becomes an influence when it interacts with other types of power. This interaction begets various elements that have a cascading effect. Following are the various elements of cyber power.

> Military element: (Primary Actors: Nation States)

Living in a world that is fashioned on the tenets of the treaty of Westphalia, nation states have latched on to the opportunities that cyberspace offers to further their goals and objectives. The US, along with Russia and China, was one of the first countries to recognize the military potential of cyberspace. Though the initial design of cyberspace was to streamline defense information exchange, cyberspace has now become an arena for nation states to exercise their power in order to accomplish their strategic goals. ‘Stuxnet’- a malware- is an appropriate example to demonstrate that nation states have achieved advanced level of weaponization and use cyber power to achieve outcomes that suit their objectives. Stuxnet, by destroying nuclear centrifuges, effectively set the Iranian nuclear program back by a decade and was an important factor, plausibly, in Iran commencing negotiations with the international community that resulted in the nuclear deal.

All the major powers of the world have acknowledged that cyber power is the new frontier of possibilities and have responded by forming dedicated units geared towards developing offensive capabilities in cyberspace. The US, in 2010, formed the US Cyber Command, in response to repeated probing and intrusions in its defense networks by foreign adversaries. While the existence and avowed objectives of US Cyber Command are public, China and Russia, though having advanced offensive cyber capabilities, have kept information on their cyber units behind a veil. Further, major defense forces, across the world, have either harmonized or are in the process harmonizing their armed capabilities to the new element of cyberspace. The military element hasn’t witnessed much activity by non-state actors as it requires significant amount of man-power and technical capabilities to develop a cyber weapon as complex and advanced as ‘Stuxnet'.

> Political element: (Primary actors: Nation states, non-profit organizations, terrorist outfits, citizens; Secondary actors: botnet herders, social media companies)

Cyberspace has become a platform for a variety of actors that exercise cyber power to further their causes. As mentioned before, entry into cyberspace is cheap and unencumbered and flow of information is fast from point of origin to the point of destination.This has thrown in a whole set of challenges for the current world order. Nation states in connivance with non-state actors (botnet herders) have engaged in nefarious activities to disrupt and disturb the flow of trade and commerce and civilian life in general. Estonia, in 2007, was subject of such activities; Cyber adversaries used botnet herders to carry out distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks that targeted banks, government websites, and news websites. While these attacks did not lead to any loss of life or kinetic loss of any nature, the attacks, apart from disrupting users’ access to online services, had more propaganda value attached to them. Given these attacks were in the wake of a political maneuver that was at odds with the Kremlin, Russia was held loosely responsible for tacitly supporting these attacks through patriotic hackers that enjoyed patronage from the Kremlin.

More recently, the reports, though unsupported by strong evidence, suggest that Russia was involved in the hack of Democratic National Committee’s network; the most plausible reason behind the hack being to undermine Hillary Clinton, who held an adversarial attitude towards Putin. If investigations provide clinching evidence, this would be a first in the history of US presidential elections in which a foreign power intervened to support a particular candidate. Non-profit organizations such as WikiLeaks wield massive cyber power and cast a long shadow on the policy making apparatuses around the world. Governments, democratic or authoritarian, survive on the semblance of accountability and transparency. Organizations such as WikiLeaks are questioning the informational asymmetry that exists between the government and the governed. Further, transparency organizations are putting to the test the legitimacy of the paternalistic attitude of the state. While non state actors such as WikiLeaks seek to reform government and governance, terrorist outfits, such as ISIS, use cyberspace as a platform for radicalizing and recruiting impressionable youth; a majority of ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq are foreign fighters and have been recruited through cyberspace. Before the introduction of email and later Social media platforms, communication monitoring was within a manageable band. Information revolution has worked like a double edged sword. While it has revolutionized the way business is conducted and people interact, it has provided a fillip to actors that seek to destabilize the global order through violent means.

>Economic element

Information revolution has by and large been a force of good for the society at large, its application to further economic interests has unequivocally raised the global Gross domestic product (GDP). All major companies have shifted information related to business practices, strategy, customers, suppliers, technology, and markets to architecture in the cyberspace. While this helps in optimizing operations and raising efficiency levels, it also makes companies susceptible to economic cyber espionage and intrusion. While cyber criminals may take undue advantage of the openness of cyberspace, abusing their cyber power, their actions would be more of a nuisance. However, nation states possess the resources to launch economic espionage in cyberspace by supporting non-state actors, directly or indirectly. In the past few years, companies such as Coca-Cola, Sony, and Target have been the subject of cyber-attack that have targeted their information architecture. These attacks have the potential to adversely impact business plans of these companies and ultimately their bottom line. The US department of Justice has formally indicted unit 61398 , a cyber unit within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China, conveying cyber economic espionage against private sector interests is intolerable. While it is an open secret that nations indulge in espionage activities against each other, including cyber espionage, actively aiding economic cyber espionage is brazen abuse of cyber power. The basic premise for mutual tolerance towards espionage activities is that spying to secure one’s country’s interests is loosely acceptable. However, actively engaging in cyber espionage to further commercial interests is pushing the envelope too.

How Cyber Power is different from other types of Powers

• Cyber Power is complementary: In an armed conflict, the inability of cyber power to directly cause kinetic damage makes it a complementary weapon at the disposal of military planners. Cyber weapons would, most likely, be used to delay enemy response and hinder troop and resource mobilization. Further, a cyber-attack would work well, preferably, when considering a first strike. Given attackers have an advantage over defenders in cyberspace, attackers must utilize zero-day vulnerabilities that exist in defender’s system. Also, for a cyber-attack to be useful, it will have to be followed by a conventional strike. Further, the conventional strike has to be carried out in a fixed time frame when the enemy is reeling under the effects of the cyber-attack. Given the hardware affected by the cyber-attack will be replaced or purged soon, a conventional strike must not be delayed. Moving forward from the conventional military description of complementarity of cyber power. Civilians, most recently in Arab Spring, have used cyber power to organize themselves and demanded regime change. In this case too, civilians can organize themselves on social media but they would have to protest in a conventional way that involves protesting in person.

• Cyber power varies from actor to actor- Even after egalitarian access afforded by cyberspace to its users, influence possessed by different actors varies on the resources at their disposal. For example, a DDOS attack carried out by a cyber adversary, assuming a non-state actor, can’t be sustained in the face of determined defenses. Whereas, a DDOS attack carried out by a state actor has the potential to last much longer, but in that case attribution is possible that may have geopolitical implications.

• Cyber power is stealthy: Unlike the Army, Navy or Air force, cyber power is stealthy and is deployed by exploiting zero day vulnerabilities- weakness in enemy systems that are unknown to him- present in enemy’s defense networks. The downside of stealth, for the victim of a cyber-attack, is that the harmful effects of the attack may remain unknown, even when the attack is over. Further a cyber-attack is much easier to organize and launch than an armed invasion that requires greater mobilization of resources.

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Issues with Cyber Power

• Crisis Stability- The cold war taught the world important lessons in deterrence. Introduction of cyberspace has created a new level of deterrence requirements that need to be met. A side engaged in conflict has its set of war hawks that would advocate escalation and exploit the paranoia that conflict brings to the situation room. Cyber power has further exacerbated this paranoia. Given governments around the world engage in cyber intrusions that sometimes involve probing of defense networks and critical infrastructure, these intrusions in a crisis situation have the potential to be construed as a preparation for war; in such situations, countries could act out of fear than rationality and may go to war. Especially, in the case of China and USA. A scenario: Given China has its command and control structures in the Chinese mainland and a first strike by the US will render it defenseless, a cyber intrusion, in a tense geopolitical situation, by the US can be interpreted as a cyber reconnaissance mission, impelling China to launch all-out war on US allies and armed forces in the South China Sea and Taiwan. Recently, China and the US, recognizing the importance of addressing tensions in cyberspace, have embarked on hashing out an agreement to establish norms of engagement in cyberspace.

• Encryption and Privacy- The primacy of governments around the world in controlling and monitoring informational exchange has been more than challenged by the ongoing information revolution. This abatement in primacy of the state has been matched by a rise in private providers of communication and social media services. Of late, terrorist attacks perpetrated in Paris and San Bernardino have reignited the debate on encryption levels on communication services provided by private companies.

The terrorists, in Paris, used WhatsApp to coordinate their attacks, prompting demands from lawmakers around the world for backdoor to the encryption used by private providers of communication services. While demands for weaker encryption standards are a result of mass hysteria caused by these attacks, the supporters of weak encryption would have to contend with issues of privacy, logistics and security. Weakened encryption standards and backdoor may end up opening a Pandora’s Box in terms of data breaches and pilferage of personal information. Consumers around the world use these communication services as they trust the privacy standards of the service providers. There would be a mass exodus of consumers from these services if they believe that their privacy is at risk.

Attempts to gain backdoor access in encryption products may be the government’s way to regain and consolidate its hold over cyberspace, but it would come at the cost of a massive dead weight loss to the society. Cyber power, much like all the other types of power preceding it, has brought its own set of opportunities and challenges. While cyber power has empowered actors that didn’t exercise much power before, it has unwittingly empowered actors that use cyberspace as an arena for perpetrating crime or abetting conflict. Recently, terrorists have used platforms in cyberspace to plan and carry out attacks, leading to vociferous demands for weakened encryption; this has recharged the debate on power of the state in maintaining peace and security. Cyber power has given the state more ways to further its objectives by adding a whole bouquet of military and non-military cyber artillery to the pre-existing arsenal. However, it is the Cyber proletariat that has benefited the most from the fruits of power bestowed upon it by cyberspace, even though actions of malicious actors within the proletariat may lead to curtailment of that power. With great power comes great responsibility, and cyber power is no different.