Can we turn the agility and unpredictability of superpowered individuals into assets for the State?
Owen Walker, the 18-year-old Whitianga resident also known as Akill, was discharged without conviction in the High Court in Hamilton earlier today.
The NZ Police certainly seem to think so.
The sentence given today was a balanced decision, says Waikato crime services manager, detective inspector Peter Devoy. The police may use Walker's assistance if required in the future, he adds.
It all comes down to motivation. Our good friend Akill was most likely in it for the challenge, the notoriety, and the money (in that order), rather than motivated by any ideological drive to damage the West's network infrastructure.
Akill was a service provider for other criminal organisations; he provided a platform from which to launch attacks, steal data and otherwise target vulnerabilities in the systems he had control of.
Was Akill a superempowered service provider? A single individual providing assistance, technology or skills to 4GW organisations in exchange for compensation (money, power, status), without the associated ideological baggage. The pinnacle of Capitalism (can you taste the irony?).
The issue would be one of identification.
A superempowered service provider could be leveraged by the State with the right application of force. They have no loyalty, besides money and/or professional pride, to the groups they service; they would be a weaker link in the network than members of a terrorist cell (for example). As a service provider, these individuals would pass through a lot more information, potentially on a wider range of groups.
Given that Akill has been 'outed', his value as a captive service provider falls dramatically. No one would deal with him anymore. However, if a service provider could be identified and covertly recruited, the State would have a viable weapon.
In the age of the global guerilla, are superempowered service providers the systempunkts of 4GW groups?
The other issue, of course, is that for every Akill they catch, there are thousands more waiting for just the same opportunity.
My previous post, specifically the blue-sky solution, was injected with a dose of sarcasm.
Any prescribed solution to a problem involving interpersonal dynamics (and 4GW is inherently about the people, not the machinery of the State), especially in the absence of reliable examples, can only be conjecture. The real world is complex.
The city-state or resilient community solution to the problem of 4GW is a scenario of mutually-assured destruction for the State and opposing 4GW force. Remove a person's dependence for security/safety on the State and you erode their loyalty. If a 4GW force no longer has a State to damage, then their base of support is eroded as well (the Plausible Promise no longer exists).
Currently the infrastructure required to support a massively distributed and resilient society can only be deployed by the State; the cost is just too great.
Where we see the sort of resiliency that protects against a significant 4GW threat is in the corporate world. Large companies have the resources to disperse their offices, infrastructure and staff through multiple regions, and spend enormous amounts of money protecting them (through data/physical security measures as well as healthcare plans etc).
My current blue-sky theory is that the best fighters of 4GW will be the mega-corporations.
States are tied to specific geographic regions, cultures and ethnicities; corporations are not. State legislature is grinding slow at the best of times, and having a faster decision-making loop than your opponent is critical in 4GW. Corporations have massive advertising budgets and are already adept at molding public perception, another key component of 4GW.
We already identify with brands of electronics devices, connect with obscure automobile manufacturing groups across the internet and spend hundreds of hours watching brand-positioning advertisements. Does the future State have a Sony logo?
Fourth generation warfare strategies allow small groups to conduct attacks successfully against a much larger, more powerful and better equipped enemy. Warfighters target vulnerable points in a State's infrastructure and social fabric and exploit fallout from the State's reprisals.
Internet connectivity and the rapid advancement of technology are making it possible for smaller and smaller groups to challenge the State in this way. As self-fabrication technologies advance (not only computer-controller CNC machines to build complex mechanical parts from templates, but also whole laboratories to produce tailored viruses are available to anyone with enough money and experience) and more infrastructure becomes dependent on networked systems, the size at which a fourth generation force becomes effective shrinks; the end-game of this process is the Superempowered Individual.
One person can have the skills and motivation to inflict significant damage on the State. The Unabomber is the classic example of this, but letter bombs are unnecessary when you can unleash massive denial of service attacks against the underlying technology, from the comfort of your living room.
Police have raided the home of the alleged ringleader of an international group of cybercriminals said to be responsible for infecting more than one million computers.
The raid was conducted earlier this week at the New Zealand residence of the alleged botmaster, known online as AKILL. It was part of a joint effort by New Zealand police and the FBI.
Of course, AKILL is the provider of a service (worth, according to the media, $26 million), an arms dealer. His customer, in this case, leased AKILL's services to target a specific web presence in response to year-old forum drama.
If his target had been the Inland Revenue Department's website, say 6 hours before the yearly filing deadline, we wouldn't be perversely proud that this kid is a New Zealander. Power failures aren't the only things that can take out critical infrastructure.
The solution? Expensive, distributed resiliency in all networks throughout a society. This means providing your own power, security, food distribution and healthcare at the community level; if a 4GW entity decides to blow up the generator in the town next door, your community is not affected.
The same technological changes that empower individuals to perform acts of destruction against the State also empower people to protect themselves from such attacks. "Eco-friendly" power generation (home solar panels, small hydroelectric generators) can provide electricity for entire communities, and carbon water filters can be purchased in any supermarket.
Although a small, resilient community might not have the size or infrastructure to support (for example) an iPod factory, security and safety comes first. If the alternative is 4 hours of electricity a day, massive unemployment and hundreds of fellow citizens killed, you'll do without your shiny designer toys.
Ironically, self-sufficient and resilient communities also mean that the State becomes redundant. Primary loyalties in action.
Here's an article from the Escapist that nails the nature of Primary Loyalties and how they can contribute to, and accelerate, the collapse of in-game organisations.
To an individual, a failure cascade brings with it a change in that person's identity. Instead of saying he is a member of an alliance, he shifts his perspective locally, to his guild or himself. These changes can fracture an alliance and set the stage for its member guilds to fight among themselves.
Could have been ripped straight from a 4GW field manual.
Looks like everyone's been reading up on their 4GW theory.
On the morning a large protest was to occur outside Parliament, excerpts from the police evidence presented to secure the initial search warrants (gathered during extensive surveillance, including intercepted phone calls, audio bugs in cars, and even video recorded from hidden cameras at various sites) was published by media outlets owned by Fairfax (disclaimer: I do some writing for PC World NZ, also owned by a division of Fairfax).
Threats of legal action by the Solicitor-General followed, as well as renewed public support for the police actions.
Links to the excerpts:
Thoughts:
- Definite indications that systems disruption was to be a key tactic (a strategy that "will divide Aotearoa", specifically mentioning Telecom, the telco that lost power at a single datacentre and broke a significant portion of New Zealand's communications infrastructure).
- Training in small-unit combat manoeuvres (evidence they expected to encounter SAS or police special units, similar to the forces that conducted the raid in Ruatoki).
- References to IRA and AQ training manuals (Robb's Open-Source War).
- A sophisticated and comprehensive surveillance operation conducted by the police.
The "leak" very effectively sucked the wind out of any media coverage of the planned protest at Parliament (it still went ahead, but coverage was sparse considering the potential race-relations angle).
4GW isn't about winning hearts and minds, it's about manipulating them. The information space should be a key battleground in any moral warfighter's mind.
Score one for the State.