Some of you may have read my paper on the idea of Amazon Space. If not, please do so.

The simple idea is that in a world divided between large areas of lawfulness and diminishing but significant spaces defined by their unlawfulness, new doctrines are needed for protecting the networks from which all benefit.

Thus:

Although Amazon Space has an intrinsic strength arising from the breadth and depth of its own networked nature, it relies upon a real-life equipment (power-generators, communications cables, data storage computers) to function. Such facilities can be attacked by terrorists or saboteurs.

 

Who protects those facilities?

 

In principle it is for each state to protect those facilities sited on its own territory. But what if a state is too weak to do that, and/or allows terrorists and sophisticated criminals to use its territory as a base for plotting attacks on key Amazon Space installations?

 

If a country wants to enjoy the manifold benefits of belonging to Amazon Space, does it in turn have to accept an implicit obligation to take responsibility for defending Amazon Space pro-actively and vigorously against those who for whatever reason want to wreck it?

 

And if it is unable or unwilling to take the action needed to deal with such people, can it complain if other Amazon Space powers acting under a new version of the doctrine of collective self-defence step in to do that job instead?

Hence the emerging reliance on the technology of drones rather than full-scale invasions. We are moving away from the idea of all-out war to ruthless measures by remote control against system-threatening terrorist/criminal gangs where the local authorities are too weak to take meaningful action themselves.

Liberal voices are (of course) heard bewailing this trend as megalomaniac US military doctrine of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ – and the fantasy of absolute domination through technological supremacy that goes with it…

But how else to deal with terrorists exploiting the institutional weakness of Non-Amazon Space to plan from far away to use our technology to kill us, other than by using our technology to kill them first if possible?

This WSJ piece commends Hillary Clinton for looking hard at how IT ploys of different shapes and sizes might be used to promote pluralism and chip away at tyranny. Mrs Clinton also indirectly makes the point I have made:

"In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all."

Quite.

Mrs Clinton called for Three Internet Freedoms:

  1. The right of all peoples to have access to an uncensored Internet.
  2. The right of individuals to exercise free speech on the Internet
  3. The right of businesses and other organizations to have access to uncensored information on the Internet in order to compete fairly.

More on her speech here at the Technology Liberation Front:

… she’s right: Plenty of foreign government are still aggressively attempting to censor the Net and to repress digital technologies every second of the day. To put things in perspective, just yesterday, the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) reported that more than half a billion Internet users are being filtered worldwide.

And if you want a country-by-country synopsis of just how bad things are, check out the amazing report, Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, which is compiled by several scholars involved in the ONI project.

Memo to next UK government:

Start to talk about the philosophy of all this. Offer a core deal: any country wanting to benefit from technology created and driven by others has to shoulder the full responsibility of defending on its territory the global networks which underpin that technology from terrorists and other saboteurs. If a country can not or will not do that and so its territory falls prey to extremists, it has to accept that others may take whatever action is needed to reduce/eliminate the threat.

That idea should be written into all bilateral and EU assistance programmes as a condition for getting any of our money.