I missed the first episode of BBC Two’s new series ‘The Virtual Revolution’ but am glad I made time for Monday’s ‘Enemy of the State’. Starting with the development of the internet as a force for openness and the transfer of free information, it moves to explain how it has become a force for rebellion against governments and politics, control by member states and even terrorism and cyber war.
The show is presented by Dr Aleks Krotoski, who you might recognise from her regular column on culture and video games for The Guardian, or at last year’s Dconstruct conference, and demonstrates its gravitas by including interviews with Al Gore, Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf and Evan Williams.
The thread running through the narrative of the programme is the fight for power, the reinvention of warfare and the scramble to fill the vacuum left by the demise of the old centres of power and what that means for us.
The rhetoric is made vivid by real world examples like Twitter threatening the state when 2 million people from Iran sent tweets around the world claiming elections had been rigged. Power to the people!
As someone who hasn’t studied the origins of the internet I was fascinated by Vint Cerf’s motivation behind creating something that didn’t have any central control. The Government was in the middle of the cold war and wanted a highly reliable and resilient system so didn’t want it housed in one central place where it could be destroyed. Aleks then takes us to Mountain View in California where one of the 13 root servers is housed and I breathe a sigh of relief when she asks the one question I wanted her to ask: What happens when you pull the plug or power outage?
Here goes the answer: Most data centres around the world have bunch of redundancies, like uninterruptable power supplies, so if a root server goes down there are 12 others. Even if there is an attack on all 13, those 13 servers are a constellation of 191 other servers, so you would have to knobble a collection of servers to get an impact. As it’s a global, shared system no individual country could bring it down. An international independent body oversees the route servers, but even its role is limited. No-one has the power to regulate or turn the internet on or off.
More examples are given of the battles against authority and people. Wikileaks allows people to anonymously to blow the whistle on governments and organisations. It published the membership list of the BNP, classified documents from Guantanamo Bay, and exposed hundreds of alleged assassinations by Kenyan police. It offers a safe, anonymous way for people to submit this information, although I was left wondering whether the fact the information is out in the public domain actually stops any wrongdoing from continuing.
China is also discussed at length, focussing on the fact that the government is not only worried about information coming into its country, but more importantly about information exchanged within its walls. The programme delves into the intricacies of censorship and various tactics employed by governments and states.
Wrapping up with a bit of scare mongering themselves (and probably quite rightly too), Aleks highlights how vulnerable we are to cyber war – where there’s conflict in the real world, there’s conflict online – and the fact it’s very difficult to know who’s attacking you.
If you want to find out what you missed you can watch it on BBC’s iPlayer until 27th Feb, although it’s only available if you’re in the UK (blame the BBC, I love the internet, please don’t hate me).
