[ExI] Economic cyber-warfare

[Anders Sandberg]

William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> , 21/5/2014 12:59 AM:
We are bugging/spying on  everyone, their email, their phone conversations, as I am sure you have read about recently.  Potential enemies, our friends  - all of them.  And they, us.  Also, I am sure that industrial espionage is done by everyone.  I don't know what they are trying to accomplish by indicting Chinese officials, who will never be extradited.  Who knows what all those spooks do?
 

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 5:39 PM, John Grigg <possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com> wrote:
 China is using cyber espionage to steal up to 400 billion *annually,* from the United States!

The issue is rule of law and oversight. Up until Snowden the US claimed to be the good guy and got most of the world to think it was roughly true: sure, everybody spies on everybody, but you are nice to your friends and keep your spies under control. Had the indictment happened back then, it would have looked a bit bad for China - hand in the cookie jar, stern talking to in the WTO, maybe some concessions needed to smooth things over. Now the situation is that the US is no longer seen as any better than China *by the US allies*. In fact, across Europe organisations are now trying to harden their systems against US attacks, possibly abetted by their own governments. And assurances that friends don't snoop on friends have no value after Merkel's cellphone. Even if people believed this was the government position, they no longer think the US is in control of its agencies (consider the CIA-Feinstein shenanigans if you want non-Snowden evidence).
In a world where there are no rules for cyberespionage other than getting away with it, and major agencies deliberately try to weaken security for *everybody*, trust is weakened. And that means that friction goes up (everybody has to invest in security and scrutiny; you will not want to deal with unvetted strangers as much), the economy doesn't grow as fast and as globally, as well as increased risks of conflict. Meanwhile the risk of other actors exploiting the nasty stuff increases (the tech differential between the leader of the field and the rouge nations gets smaller, as does the difference between governments and guys in caves). Maintaining cybersecurity is hard as it is; the current situation makes things much worse. And if you add economic incentives to mess it up, we all lose. 

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20140521/8b1bda52/attachment.html>