by Dave Chappelle
from ItinCanada Website

 

Ron Deibert (PhD, University of British Columbia) is Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary research and development hothouse working at the intersection of the Internet, global security, and human rights.

As a political scientist at U of T he is involved in several collaborative cyberspace R&D projects. He is also a co-founder and a principal investigator of the Information Warfare Monitor and OpenNet Initiative projects. Mr Deibert will be speaking at SC Congress Canada in June.

OpenNet document patterns of Internet censorship and surveillance worldwide.

“We hold a mirror to state-based and other forms of Internet filtering, going back to 2002,” he said. “Every year we test in over 70 countries using field research and technical interrogation methods.”

Generally speaking in the early part of 2000s, governments either didn't care or were oblivious to what was happening on the Internet. Today censorship has become a worldwide norm.

 

In addition countries are applying next generation controls.

“They’re engaging in offensive activities and surveillance implementing new laws that bring in a climate of censorship, and in some cases forcing ISPs to do the policing for them.”

 

 

 

Part 1

May 12, 2011

The Information Warfare Monitor focuses on cyber warfare and espionage. Tracking Ghostnet and Shadows in The Cloud, published in 2010, both originated in the office of the Dalai Lama.

“Our aim was to investigate cyber espionage networks,” Mr Deibert said.

 

“So we figured it would be at a targeted organization with lax security. We also had good relations with the Tibetan government in exile through our field researchers.”

What they didn’t realize is that the same attackers had simultaneously infiltrated hundreds of high-level targets, including many governments.

“We’re trying to understand how it’s being contested, and how governments and other authorities are exercising their power in this domain. Cyberspace is a new domain of geopolitical contestation. We want to outline several complimentary forces that are leading to a watershed moment in the history and character of cyberspace.”

The major forces are first a demographic shift, from the north and west to the south and east of the planet.

 

The northern democratic countries where the knowledge economy was formed are being overtaken by the developing countries. Asia for example has 40% of the Internet population, yet it ranks sixth in terms of penetration. There’s a huge growth potential that will dwarf the number of users that come from places like Toronto or Silicon Valley or Washington DC.

Most discussion occurs inside policy circles, within constituencies that assume things - such as inside the Beltway.

“In fact the center of gravity of cyberspace is shifting before our eyes, and that will affect the character of cyberspace in ways we can’t predict.”

The Internet is expanding into countries that have long histories of state intervention.

“We need to get used to that and think about what it means.”

Communities want to communicate in their own languages.

 

That pressures linguistic domains, which in turn could lead to increasing government intervention in cyberspace.

“When we started there were only a handful of countries that filtered Internet content. Now there are over 30. Many are imposing requirements on ISPs to filter access to content. Not only is it legitimate for governments to intervene, but also they’re becoming more aggressive.”

Which leads to another factor - the militarization of the Internet. There’s a lot of hype and exaggeration about the idea of cyberwar. Yet there’s a ripple effect.

 

With the creation of the US military Cyber Command it is now overt.

“What’s different is that armed forces of governments are tasked with building doctrines to fight and win wars in this domain," said Mr Deibert.

 

"Many of these governments are looking to the underworld of cybercrime to give them an advantage. Both the attacks on Estonia and Russian-Georgian conflict involved the exploitation of cybercrime that were directed by Russian authorities, and also piled on by well-known criminal botnets.”

There is an arms race in cyberspace, and criminals are caught up in it.

“Now we have huge cold war behemoths partaking. That alone is an important force. Not just in terms of how the market is organized by defense expenditures, but also by the technology - deep packet inspection or computer exploitation tools.”

Part 2
May 16, 2011
 

In Egypt protestors found evidence that a UK firm had been contracted to assist the Egyptian secret police with computer exploitation services.

"Suddenly this technology and behavior is attractive to authoritarian regimes. A Canadian company - Netsweeper - is unapologetic about servicing this market,” said Ron Deibert, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary research and development hothouse working at the intersection of the Internet, global security, and human rights.

As a political scientist at U of T he is involved in several collaborative cyberspace R&D projects. He is also a co-founder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor projects.

“Cyberspace is owned and operated by the private sector. So when governments want to control they have to pass laws. Many of these private companies have to contravene laws of their own countries... RIM in India, for example."

To operate in a market these firms may have to turn over information on users.

 

RIM turning over data to UAE security services may result in activists being thrown in jail, or worse.

“That will become more common,” Mr Deibert said.

 

“The character of cyberspace is certainly empowering of individuals in ways we’ve never seen. At the same time, it’s a human made domain. It’s an artifact hat has been created. And it can be destroyed or changed. Looming on the horizon are many threats.”

For example: network neutrality.

 

Change is coming, both from governments wanting more control, and the large telcos that have to deal with the huge amounts of cybercrime.

“The amount of malicious traffic Bell Canada has to deal with is imposing on them the choice to discriminate the traffic to better control it,” Mr Deibert said.

“It’s a commercial imperative. Not only defending their networks, but also going out and disabling those responsible for engaging in offensive computer attacks. It raises questions, if not alarms - a Canadian company attacking inside a foreign government. If Bell can do that, what’s stopping Chinese from doing that to a Canadian ISP that hosts a Falun Gong page? It legitimizes the behavior.”

The US needs to be able to respond aggressively. Whether you agree or not.

“In response to Shadows in the Cloud, where our report showed evidence of Chinese infiltrators inside Indian infrastructure, India proposed passing laws allowing patriotic hacking.”

And of course “patriotic” is defined by the definer.

 

After Wikileaks founder was arrested, Anonymous targeted Visa and Mastercard, the Tunisian government, an obscure US church, and then HPGary.

“This is the climate that’s engendered by the overall militarization of cyberspace. Now it’s not restricted at all - it‘s openly advocated.”

The huge market for cyber security now has offensive capabilities.

“What is Canada doing here?” asked Mr Deibert.

 

“As a country with a huge geographic landmass with distributed population, we’re dependent on telecommunications more than any other. We have no foreign cyberspace policy, in contrast to many of our allies. We’re dependent on an open yet secure global communications space. What can we do - cyberspace arms control? It may not have merit, yet it’s worthy of discussion.”

There’s a lot that could be done in the law enforcement side. One reason cybercrime is exploding is lack of law enforcement, especially cooperation between countries.

 

And law enforcement officers are picky about which laws they want to enforce.

“We did an investigation on Koobface, which was using Facebook. We had access to their command and control infrastructure. We gave the information to the RCMP, which did nothing with it. Low and behold the command and control infrastructure of Koobface is now set up in Montreal, by a well-known ISP that hosts malicious networks.”