Technology for the dark side

Glenn Reynolds:

Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, by John Robb (Wiley, 224 pp., $24.95)

Last year, I wrote a book called An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Government, Big Media, and Other Goliaths. It was a celebration of how technology empowers the little guy, though I did spend some time discussing the darker sides of this development. John Robb’s Brave New War is in a way the mirror image of my argument: it devotes a lot of space to the dark side of the technological empowerment of individuals and small groups, and much less to potential upsides.

The dark side is certainly there. In the old days, you needed many people to commit significant mayhem—something like a Roman legion, or at least a century. Nowadays, one man with an AK-47 is probably a match for a hundred Roman legionaries, and modern explosives make matters even more asymmetrical. In the foreseeable future, Robb concludes, we may even see a situation where an individual can declare war on the world—and win. Or as science fiction writer Vernor Vinge put it in his recent book Rainbows End, set in 2025: “Nowadays Grand Terror technology was so cheap that cults and criminal gangs could acquire it . . . . In all innocence, the marvelous creativity of humankind continued to generate unintended consequences. There were a dozen research trends that could ultimately put world-killer weapons in the hands of anyone having a bad hair day.”

All sorts of technological trends—from biotechnology to nanotechnology—work to amplify the lethality of individuals and small groups. But the biggest contemporary source of bad-guy empowerment, Robb rightly notes, comes from the vulnerability of our own modern systems and networks for electrical distribution, telecommunications, transportation, food distribution, and more, which are subject to swift disruption if critical nodes or resources are destroyed....

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Robb is a critic of “brittle security”—the approach that produces a hard shell but a soft center. He’s right to be critical. As Robb makes clear, terrorism is a fast-moving, dispersed phenomenon that depends on the varying talents of lots of enthusiastic participants. In my own book, I noted that the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 staged the only really successful response to the 9/11 terrorists. Likewise, I pointed to “white hat” hackers who were pursuing jihadist websites (with little or no cooperation from the duly constituted authorities) and the rapidly improvised evacuation effort in lower Manhattan on September 11. Successful approaches to terrorism are likely to incorporate, and facilitate, responses like these. It seems plausible to me that we will want a security approach that integrates the talents and observational abilities of ordinary people in ways that our professionalized security bureaucracies generally resist. The same is true for disaster response generally. A considerable academic literature exists on this subject, and Robb could have drawn upon the work of people like Kathleen Tierney and others in an expanded version of his rather brief “what to do” discussion.

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I will be taking a look at this book in the near future. Its point about the enemy adapting our technology to use against us is just another example of the parasitic nature of this enemy and what we must do to fight parasites.