According to a report in The New York Times this week,
the presence of Russian spy ships near important trans-Atlantic data
cables is causing consternation among American military and intelligence
officials. What, if anything, are the Russians planning to do? Are they trying to see how easily they could cut the cables if war broke out?
All
anybody knows for sure is that the game theory that we used to plot out
provocations and responses during the Cold War is obsolete in a digital
age.
On the one hand, concerns about
acts of digital sabotage in wartime are silly. If war broke out between
the United States and Russia, we'd have much bigger problems on our
hands than spotty connectivity over the Internet. Sure, it would put a
serious dent in Internet-based communications, international banking and
a host of other rather essential digital traffic. But unless an enemy
shot our satellites out of the sky, the military could maintain basic
command and control without the Internet.
On the other hand, the genuine threat here
is that the Internet offers a new way for superpowers to, in theory,
wage war without blowing up the whole planet. Tactically, an offensive
against a Western data pipeline would be more like an extreme embargo.
It would be nasty and debilitating, but it doesn't necessarily call for
nuclear retaliation.
It's a way to
cause pain without bombing cities or launching the kinds of assaults
that demand an escalation of violence. Like the recent hack of U.S.
government employee files, presumably by China, it's a meaningful attack but in a virtual realm, making it hard to gauge an appropriate response.
That's
why this alleged saber rattling (or actually wire-cutter rattling)
makes us nervous. It suggests a whole new range of potential engagements
for which we need to establish new protocols.
What makes this difficult is that -- at
least from our point of view -- an attack on the Internet wouldn't
really be an attack on America so much as an attack on the free world.
Europe's objections to National Security Agency and corporate
surveillance notwithstanding, the Internet wires us all together in one
big family of Western corporate media companies, free expression and
democratic governance.
From the
perspective of a downsized Russia attempting to reassert its former
nationalist and hierarchical glory, the Internet is just an extension of
American imperialism. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Apple, and
Intel are all essentially American companies, and their platforms and
devices are embedded with the values of free market capitalism.
Russia's
oligarchy may not realistically want to restore the entirety of the
former Soviet Union, but it does want to maintain an entirely less open
and fluid order -- one it sees threatened by the spread of the Western
market, ideology and, yes, Internet, through Europe and beyond.
