Internet Transparency Complicates, Facilitates Foreign Policy, Forum Told

Traditional diplomacy is “sovereign to sovereign” and “normally quiet,” and only with the advent of telephones and telegraphs did emissaries get more than “general instructions” from their governments, said Gerald Hyman, a former official at the U.S. Agency for International Development. “The state-to-state model has begun to wither a bit at the edges” with Syria as the leading example now, he said: Governments have to deal more often with nongovernmental organizations and even terrorist groups. The past three U.S. secretaries of state have gone to universities and other venues to “engage a larger population” in countries where they have talks, said Hyman, now a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the openness of the Internet “really complicates” diplomacy, he said. The closed nature of talks “might be useful” and the changes wrought by Wikileaks are “not always beneficial,” because the “hypotheticals” that used to be tossed between diplomats are now at risk of going public online and becoming “indiscretions,” Hyman said: There’s no “reasonable expectation of privacy” and it changes how countries relate to each other. There’s no chance Henry Kissinger could have secretly gone to China for diplomacy in a world of “twittering ambassadors,” Hyman said.

The use of information and communication technology (ICT) by “spoilers” like terrorists or criminal gangs has created more “volatility” in countries, said Joseph Siegle, director of research at the National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies. Such groups can “command an alternative narrative” to that of the government to aggrieved groups at home or abroad, he said. But because ICT has historically been “under the radar” and primarily useful to governments, the expansion of ICT in places like Africa is also empowering civil society, he said: The recent election in Kenya featured “more debate than they ever had,” including on social media, and voters could even track poll results online by district. It granted legitimacy to the outcome and reduced “a key driver of instability,” Siegle said. Even if the Internet causes short-term conflict, for the “long term, institutionally,” the Internet creates more stability, he said: For bloggers and others “to be effective they need to be protected” in their speech.

China is “half-lurching, half-running” toward “cognitive dominance,” said Jim Herlong, an independent cybersecurity consultant who helped build the U.S. Coast Guard cybercommand. Such dominance refers to a system that “makes people in expertise really the center of things,” he said. China sees the electromagnetic spectrum as a “warfighting domain” in which it can change information on a competitor’s system, prevent information from being received or even block devices from connecting, Herlong said: Its government has a “massive investment in infrastructure” to serve its “digital natives” as well.

The threat of war used to maintain peace in the cold war should now be flipped to “mutually assured connection,” said Lorelei Kelly, “Smart Congress” pilot lead for the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. Her time as a staffer in Congress, witnessing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the foreign interventions of the 1990s, impressed upon Kelly that “we haven’t fully understood” that the “overreliance on coercion and control” doesn’t work anymore, she said. The U.S. is missing “distributed and human-centered threats” and it needs a “security strategy for civil society” in which social media are already serving a purpose, Kelly said: “What the Internet revolution has created is a world of peers” in which countries must decide whether “drones or phones” will be dominant.