What about people with dual nationality. Do they get to vote twice? Once in each country.
Why should they influence the world twice as much as I do?
Besian Kuko
Governing Cyberspace: an attempt from people out of touch
Carnegie Europe is pompously launching today a report on the governance of cyberspace. The launch is accompanied by an event co-organised by Microsoft. Live stream here.
I’m offering here a small rebuttal to several of the of the points found in the report’s brief:
Develop norms regulating government-industry collaboration on mass data collection and retrieval. To enhance trust in the Internet, the transatlantic partners should develop a joint code of conduct for regulating interactions between government agencies, large Internet companies, and data handlers regarding access to online data.
For those who care, trust is already gone. Rebuilding it would take much more than new regulations. Actual actions would be expected.
Create a new multilateral instrument to prevent cybercrime. The transatlantic partners should develop more robust ways to detect and analyze cyberattacks so that culprits can be more easily identified and future attacks better deterred.
Detecting and analyzing cyberattacks is far from the surest way for preventing it. Instead, investing in tools to stop those attacks as they are happening should be the priority.
Propose amendments to international trade law to introduce penalties for economic cyberespionage. Changing World Trade Organization rules will require a joint action led by the transatlantic partners.
This is a ridiculous statement. Espionage is espionage no matter where it happens. Be it on the cyberspace or on the moon. There should be no special set of regulation specific to the cyberspace. Software such as OpenBSD have had a strong standing record in the matter yet never received much support from governments.
Lead efforts to codify norms governing the export of surveillance technologies. The transatlantic partners should guide this effort that would help to constrain the capacity of illiberal regimes to restrict Internet freedoms.
Until not long ago, PGP was classified as a weapon and had heavy export restriction. This did not stop the program’s source code from leaking out first in the form of a book printed in a nice ORC friendly font then then trendy t-shirts.
Agree on a mandate for NATO to develop a more robust approach to cyberdeterrence. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has developed a strategy focused on enhancing the resilience of the alliance against cyberattacks. But NATO also needs a more offensive posture to improve its overall deterrence.
Repeating myself, I am going to say again that the very concept of cyberdeterrence is absurd. It seems to be born of the mind of people who have no understanding of technology. Anything short of large scale DDOS or physical action can not be a deterrent in cyberspace.
The Greek situation
A few word on Greece’s situation.
Politically, things are bad for Greece. The European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, collectively referred as the Troika, are putting enormous pressure on Greece to shape it’s policy according to their plans. Greece’s new far-left government flat out refused. This started a blaming game. Some put the blame on Greece’s excessively generous social benefits. Others, on Troika’s excessively stringent requests. The relative lack of experience of Greece’s new government is also a factor not to be underestimated.
Yet, nobody seems to have taken an objective look at the situation.
Taking a look back, (based on The Economist’s global debt clock) Greece’s public debt rose to a staggering 451 billion USD in 2011 but has since recovered to pre-crisis levels at around 250 billion. The problem, as it seems is that pre-crisis, in 2006, Greek debt represented about 100% of it’s GDP; in 2015, that is about 150% of Greek GDP. In the last ten years, Greek economy shrunk by 50%.
All systemic reforms demanded by the Troika are moot provided they don’t get enforced. That has been Greece’s main problem. So far, the country has suffered from massive tax evasion. Syriza’s government claims to work on that. Yet, it seems, they don’t get any recognition for it. Greece has a pretty bad history when it comes to tax collection.
EDIT: Jan 2022 added a chart of Greek GDP to back up the seemingly crazy claim of 50M% drop in GDP
There are no nations
In the 1976 movie Network, Arthur Jensen, a media mogul makes the the following bold yet true speech:
You have meddled with the primary forces of nature, Mr Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear?
You think you merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tide and gravity. It is ecological balance.
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems. One vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-varied, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rands, rubles, pounds and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today.
And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will atone.
Am I getting through to you, Mr Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their Councils of State? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, mini-max solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bye-laws of of business. The world is a business, Mr Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.
And our children will live, Mr Beale, to see that … perfect … world in which there is no war nor famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit. In which all men will hold a share of stock.
All necessities provided. All anxieties tranquilized. All boredom amused.
This was almost 40 years ago.
Things have changed. Yet IBM, ITT, AT&T, DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon still remain powerful global corporations.
America still remains a global power. For now. The USSR collapsed giving birth to the Russian Federation and a dozen other states. And the only reason Russia remains as slightly more than a regional power is its territory extending over two continents.
The Easy Solution
Simple solutions are easy mistakes.
— Me (?)
It’s all political
As soon as the second World War ended, the allies forced displaced persons and refuges from all nationalities across liberated Europe to return “home.” This was, more often than not, against their will. “Home,” at that time, meant the USSR for more than 2,200,000 people. Of which, it is estimated, one on five ended up either shot or sent to a Gulag. Nobody cared.
These forced repatriations didn’t cease till 1947 as the Cold War became a thing.
It is said that the 50,000 Czech nationals still in Austria and Germany by 1948 during Communist coup in Prague were immediately accorded the status of political refugee at once as of February that year.
A right for a wrong
Sometimes, it is much easier to get people to do the right thing by giving them wrong reasons.
The death of God
Nietzsche claimed God dead. He justified it by reasoning that thought and culture had effectively reached a point where they could no longer rest on the unproven ideas, beliefs and assumptions of religion. I think Nietzsche was a bit short sighted both in his vision and timescales at which the concept of God develops. Then and there.
The biggest problem, Salah thought, was how one went about killing a god. You could burn its scriptures, wipe out its worshipers, kill its avatars, but that would only ever delay it. Eventually it would come back, whispering, and the whole cycle would begin again. It could wait forever.