had been underway for many decades; masked latterly by a credit fuelled
boom in consumer spending. Chinese concerns continue to invest heavily
in overseas infrastructure of every sort; including the next generation of
the UK's nuclear power stations and the new high speed train system.
The Internet would simply not exist without equipment of Chinese
manufacture.
interdependency. The rise of a middle class has been both predicate and
consequence of the Chinese economic miracle. The Chinese middle class
enjoy less direct political and societal power, and influence than their
equivalents in the liberal democratic heartlands. The key to the continued,
relative, dormancy of the Chinese middle class is sustained and substantial
economic growth. Affluence, a necessary palliative to the frustrations of
political impotence and essential to the deflection of the middle class from
the leadership of populist protests. History teaches that an alienated and
disenfranchised middle class make formidable leaders of those similarly
alienated and disenfranchised elsewhere across society, and that the
exercise of such leadership is far more likely during periods of extended
economic contraction. The political leadership of China has no rational
interest in crippling or even seriously degrading the economies of the
world upon which it depends for its very survival.
will continue to happen. Individuals, companies, social constructs and
nations compete, using any and all means at their disposal. We need to
gather more evidence than we currently possess about the nature of these
bad things as they are manifest in the cyber domain. We must quantify and
analyse data exfiltration rather than simply assert its, undoubted, existence.
We must contextualise our analysis and root it in the reality of the world
as it is, rather than the world we once knew. We must learn a far more
nuanced way of thinking and a far more agile and responsive way of acting.
We must relinquish the use of two dimensional categories such as `User',
and `State', and `Non State'. They conceal more than they reveal; expose
more than they protect.
the cyber supply chain. To design and manufacture the silicon wafers
themselves and assemble the finished computing devices under the
tightest controls possible. To render every aspect of the process the
subject of full disclosure and trusted hands. The costs of this, in every
sense, will be astronomical; unsustainable beyond the tiny portion of the
overall requirement for which they will be essential. System capability will
be degraded, agility will be compromised, and any notion of a financially
prudent return on investment will be laughable. Such efforts, necessary
though they will be, must be confined to the absolute minimum. Any
attempt to generalise such extreme remedial counter measures as a
response to the great supply chain fear would represent an attempt at
economic autarky. History repeatedly teaches that attempts to pursue
such a strategy as anything other than a narrow and exceptional response
to extreme conditions is doomed to fail, often precipitating crisis worse
than that which it sought to avoid. Lessons that Kim Jong-un would do well
to re-visit as he continues the practice of the Juche ideas he inherited from
his father.
that won us the Cold War and embrace, instead, the more subtle and
observation of effects, and the generation of perpetual feedback cycles.
We must actively enable the core structures of our systems to depend
upon continuous modification of their own states. At the root of our fears
about the vulnerabilities of the supply chain specifically, and of cyber more
generally, is the apprehension that our adversaries have proven better able
to exploit the true form of cyber than we have, and even less comfortably,
the darker fear that the deep cause of our failure to counter the success of
our adversaries is us.
inextricably interconnected. Every nation, every society, every institution
of the state, every individual, our entire global civilization, depends upon
this new phenomenon. Thus arises a paradox deep at the heart of our
primal fears about the security of the cyber supply chain. Given precisely
this complexity, and interconnectedness, and existential dependence, then,
if the core silicon is infected, the execution of the attack will destroy those
who perpetrated the atrocity just as surely as it destroys those against
whom it was aimed. Because of the atomised, fragmented and volatile
nature of the modern supply chain, it is in principal possible to plant a
latent attack capability at such a low level within systems that detection is
indeed impossible. However, the execution of such an attack is, literally, a
zero sum game. Or perhaps more accurately, an extinction level event.
complexity and chaos are at the heart of the transformative and
empowering qualities of the cyber phenomenon. We must emerge from
our deep state of shock and denial and use the very power we have come
to fear. Cyber is not amenable to command and control. Rather it must
be existed within; its effect observed and unceasingly managed. Cyber is
a transformation in human affairs of at least equal significance to that of
the Neolithic Revolution, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the
Industrial Revolution; combined. To the extent that the computer systems
upon and within which cyber exists were once ours; they are no longer
so. Cyber belongs to society. Cyber is society. Our job is now to enable
and empower the evolution of society through the development of a safer
human experience of cyber.