Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

Click here for contact details, other articles and personal details

The future of direct action

October 2000

The internet is starting at last to affect the way people organise themselves. This was inevitable and very predictable - in BT, we predicted network based communities as a new power group in 1993 and I doubt if we were the first. Having spent the years between regularly talking to government about this potential problem for them and having being dismissed as technologists that live in a different world, the temptation to say 'we told you so' is irresistible. This last year, we have seen the internet being regularly used by the 'reclaim the streets' movement to co-ordinate their demonstrations, and more recently the action against capitalism and globalisation, genetic modification and now the fuel protests. We have seen further evidence of the speed that messages travel via email, manifested in rapidly building panic buying based on nothing more than a rumour. But government still doesn't understand the magnitude of the potential problem facing them.

Recent actions took place in a world where only 5% of people worldwide use the internet, and few of those use it regularly. Even in the UK, where well over 10 million people have home access to the internet, only a fraction of those are regularly active. Access rates are very slow, e-mail is primitive, and there are no simple ways of finding and reaching others who share the same viewpoints. Nevertheless, protesters have discovered that protests can be co-ordinated without any formal leadership, with no ring-leaders to arrest. Action can be arranged and implemented very quickly indeed through the speed of email, and relevant information spreads extremely rapidly through the population.

But in a few years, almost everyone will be using the internet. It will be embedded, all pervasively, into every area of life, simply because it will make things much easier and involve much less stress. Access rates will be high, and intelligence on the net will be well developed. With our preferences known to our computer and various agents acting on our behalf, we could be instantly informed about events that are of interest to us. We may actively choose to belong to various cybercommunities, and informally belong to others simply because of our preferences. So any actions we have seen to date are the very tip of the iceberg, just a glimpse of what is to come.

Imagine an email from the world's Chief Environmentalist (there isn't one today but there may be), being sent to everyone using the net. In the right climate, this could happen within minutes. The email tells users that the USA has been damaging the environment through a reckless energy policy, and refuses to agree to reductions of CO2 emission. It recommends imposing economic sanctions to pursuade them. At the bottom of the mail are two buttons. By pressing the 'I agree' button, the user's e-commerce preferences are automatically set to exclude products and services from the USA. The result could be a billion or more of the richest people on the planet excluding the USA from business, within a few minutes. No geographically based power structure or country can impose such a penalty so quickly.

What is more interesting is that if the USA still refused to change policy on the basis of economic sanctions, the pressure can be made even more direct. Having a high-technology-based economy makes them particularly vulnerable to all forms of cyber-attack. They are well aware of this and defend against it. But most of their activity is focused on hostile countries, such as Iraq, who they perceive as hiring hackers to bring down their networks and computer systems. Unfortunately, there are an infinite number of ways to bring down systems as complex as theirs. To name just a few, electronic bombs; evolving adaptive viruses, trojans and worms; information waves, correlated traffic cultivation, exploiting emergent behaviours, even selling them systems with embedded switches are all likely to be used in the future, as well as many conventional forms of cyber-attack. If a few hackers can bring down Yahoo, E-bay and Amazon, what can thousands of simultaneous attacks from a massive cyber-community achieve? Many automated attacks could be distributed and co-ordinated using smart e-mails, making it more difficult to defend against. The key problem is that the best possible defence can only defend against a finite number of approaches, whereas the vulnerability set is infinite.

It is also impossible to retaliate. You can't fire a missile at a cyber-community, and anonymity technology could make it easy for them to hide on the net too. So it is hard to find anyone to retaliate at, let alone actually retaliate!

The potential for such direct action is very real, and is a high price to pay for the convenience and effectiveness of an IT enabled economy. We are not far behind the USA in our levels of vulnerability. The Y2K problem showed us how dependent we already are on our electronic systems. As that dependency increases over the next decade, we should ensure that we retain at least the skeleton of industrial-age systems as a fallback for use when the new systems are crashed by a hostile cyber-community. We will certainly face such threats, from a few people trying to electronically close a few oil refineries, through to major economic attack by global cybercommunities.