Don't Worry – We're From the Internets!

Exploring the Tension Between Network and National Identities

April 29, 2009

Richard Nevins
Professor Manuel Castells
COMM 559 – Globalization, Communication & Society
Annenberg School for Communication – University of Southern California
 Don't Worry – We're From the Internets: The Tension Between Network and National Identities

I. Introduction

From its early beginnings as a network of just a handful of American research universities, the

internet has grown to become a massive, global network of networks that connects more than one

billion people around the world. While the costs and benefits of connecting so many people to the

internet will continue to be debated and examined, sometimes under-recognized is the achievement of

establishing and populating a network that connects so many users across geographies, national

boundaries and cultural and economic circumstances. Through accessing this globally interconnected

and interdependent network, internet users have been able to inhabit a space that is separate from the

everyday lived experiences of their 'real lives,' and construct network identities that represent them in a

virtual world. These network identities, empowered by a libertarian ethos injected into the code of

internet standards by many of the early developers of the network, are fluid, with users being able to

exert considerable control over the way that they are perceived by others through the careful

management of information disclosures and the positive association with existing social, cultural or

ethnic identities.

Considering the internet's global reach, these network identities present a challenge to the

traditional notion of national identity and sovereignty. The deterritorialized space of the internet

permits users to access foreign communities and information without physically crossing national

boundaries, and to participate with geographically dispersed affinity groups on the basis of shared

identity or mutual interest. Given that agents can engage in both benevolent and malevolent activities

on the network, the presence of a globally-diffused network identity appears to undermine the authority

of national governments, threaten their ability to manage and regulate the ways that citizens can access

information, and weaken the relevance of a shared national identity among compatriots on the internet.

The result is a less influential nation-state

 Still, despite this rhetoric of virtualization and deterritorialization, the internet is a network that

relies on a specific physical infrastructure to operate, and an education in the necessary skills and

equipment needed to access it. The components of this infrastructure, from the server farms that deliver

information and the fiber-optic cables that literally connect nations across the oceans, to the end-user

terminals that access the network, exist within the jurisdiction of national governments, or are managed

through international treaties and agreements that encourage nation-states to support each other's

sovereignty. This provides them with a means of asserting their presence and a degree of control on the

global network, and presents a palpable response to the notion of a post-national identity on the internet

that is free from the control of a duly-constituted national political and judicial authority. Additionally,

access to this network is regulated at least indirectly by telecommunications law and government

agencies like the Federal Communications Commission in the United States. Some nations, notably

China, institute far more overt and strict controls of internet access, and as we will see , even liberal

democracies are known to quash speech and commerce on the internet from time to time,

demonstrating that they are not entirely toothless.

What, then, is the balance of power between the national identity that has long served as the

primary organizing principle for international diplomacy, trade and culture, and this new network

identity? In this paper, I will analyze the nature of these network identities and examine how they come

into conflict with the interests and authority of national identities. Beginning with a brief investigation

of the establishment of internet protocols, I will explain how early decisions made by computer

programmers and hackers involved with developing internet standards and software have influenced

the separation of network identities from national identities. I will next consider how users have

themselves employed the openness and freedom inherent in the network to begin to widen the rift

between network and national identities. Finally, I will discuss how nation-states, aware of this

undermining of their authority, and under virtual siege from malicious actors, have attempted to

establish means of defending themselves and taking the fight to the cyber-warriors in an effort to
diminish the gulf that now separates national identities from network identities.

II. Encoding Deterritorialization

The network that is generally recognized as the precursor to the internet, the Defense

Department funded ARPANET, was a peculiar beast. Although it connected a number of research

universities and institutions, it had no central governing structure or organization. Indeed, at the outset

it did not even have common protocols to ensure that all of the relatively few users on the network

were able to share resources and information with each other. In an effort to establish standards for

ARPANET, the Network Working Group (NWG) was convened in 1968 by a group of researchers and

graduate students to address the various interoperability issues and other challenges that confronted the

network's operations (Abbate, 1999: 73).

The principle documents produced by the NWG (and later the IETF) were the Request for

Comment (RFC) series, wherein network engineers and computer scientists would submit proposals

and suggested solutions to address the growing pains of the ARPANET (Crocker, 2009). Following a

period of comment and suggestion, many RFC's became de facto standards applied across the network.

In RFC 3, founding NWG member Steve Crocker described the broad purpose of the RFC series as

providing documentation of “any thought, suggestion, etc. related to the HOST software or other

aspect of the network.” (Crocker, 1969) The informal nature of the RFC series (anybody could submit

an RFC, and 5,540 have been published in 40 years) reflected the openness and flexibility that the

NWG members intended to infuse into the network, and pains were typically taken to ensure

interoperability and openness on the network for the benefit of all users (Leiner et al, 2003).

This culture of sharing was common to much of computer programming as practiced in the

computer science departments of American universities. These communities sprang up from an

unlikely confluence of sources: academic computer scientists and hackers partnering with military
researchers and entrepreneurs (Castells, 2001: 37). Each group approached the same goal with different

motivations, but all of them contributed to both the creation of the networks that became the internet,

and the underlying ethos of redundancy, interoperability and freedom that still informs the network

today. The combination of federal funding via the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

(DARPA), a steady flow of motivated new engineering talent in the students, and the entrepreneurial

drive to identify, develop and capitalize on the technologies of the new network society were

instrumental in achieving the rapid deployment and expansion of the internet.

As the community of programmers and academic researchers grew, they began to set

themselves about finding more problems for their increasingly capable computers to solve. A doctrine

among this group, who preferred to call themselves hackers (a word that then bore no negative

connotations), held that sharing code and making improvements to programs was the duty of a

computer programmer (Williams, 2002). One hacker whose commitment to this ethos was greater than

most was named Richard Stallman. Stallman, a graduate of Harvard's computer science department,

was working at MIT's AI Lab when he had his first unhappy brush with proprietary software. While

hackers generally held that sharing and improving code was the appropriate behavior for programmers,

the entrepreneurs who were also participating in the cycle of innovation surrounding information

technology and computing wanted to make money. Many hackers moderated the morals of the hacker

ethic with a self-preservation instinct when it came to finding ways to maintain themselves through

coding, but Stallman was not one of those hackers (Raymond). When he found himself confronted with

a proprietary printer driver from Xerox, he became galvanized against the notion of privately-owned

code, and decided to provide an alternative to programs whose source code was locked away.

Richard Stallman would become a hero of the open source software movement, and formed the

Free Software Foundation to support it. He also created the GNU General Public License, a software

license that became a standard in the open source movement. The GPL was designed to keep source

code open and free, and prevented any software written under it from being taken proprietary – much to
the consternation of entrepreneurs at places like Xerox. While the open source software community

was largely ignored and marginalized from the perspective of mainstream consumers who were only

beginning to be introduced to personal computers, it nurtured a large community of programmers

worldwide who collaborated on numerous projects that play an important role in the performance of the

internet today, including perhaps most notably the Apache HTTP Server software. Now, many ordinary

internet users may find themselves using open-source software like Firefox to access the web, and even

proprietary software companies have shown a great willingness to provide greater access to their

programs via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that permit third-party additions to products

and services as varied as Facebook, the iPhone and iGoogle widgets. The ethos of free software, and

the hackers who developed much of that early software, would infuse itself into the early networks that

these hackers had access to, and can still be felt today. While free software labored mostly in the

somewhat thankless realms of academia and server-side software, proprietary programs do deserve

credit for developing popular consumer-directed proprietary software such as operating systems,

business applications and computer games which were ultimately responsible for driving the adoption

of personal computers by mainstream consumers. These users would eventually take their computer

experience online where they would encounter open source software, whether they knew it or not.

The development of the internet continued in the relatively isolated world of engineering and

computer sciences institutions and select government agencies for many years, but by 1984 the

deployment of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) first outlined in RFC 675

(Cerf et al, 1974) established the basis for a richer, larger, and more autonomous network environment.

Significantly, the development of the TCP/IP standards led directly to the establishment of the Domain

Name System (DNS), which improved the accessibility of many functions of the still-fledgling internet

to less technically proficient users by translating machine-readable IP addresses into meaningful names

appended with the Top Level Domains (TLD) that are familiar to us today, including .com, .edu and

.gov. As described by RFC 1034, the DNS was deemed necessary because of a growth in the volume
and nature of traffic and functionality on the network (Mockapetris, 1987). The DNS system allowed

for a decentralized method of naming, which ceded the control of naming decisions to a series of

consensus-based consortiums, replacing the earlier regime of a centrally organized HOSTS.txt system,

which had maintained, updated and regularly distributed an authoritative list of network addresses as

explained in RFC 952 (Harrenstien et al, 1985).

As the internet began to spread its reach to foreign countries, the community of network

engineers and computer programmers first grappled with questions of global standards and other

practical logistical questions such as language. Notably, these issues of interoperability in terms of

language are applied only to the human operators on the network because from the beginning the

network was in principle designed to be able to operate on a global scale. As stated in RFC 2277,

“Internationalization is for humans. This means that protocols are not subject to internationalization.”

(Alvestrand, 1998). Protocols are not subject to internationalization because there is not difference in

the protocol across national boundaries; machine language does not change from one territory to

another. In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to 'internationalizing' the DNS. In RFC

3536, the challenge of internationalization is described: “It should be possible for anyone to enter or

read these text strings, which means that Internet users must be able to be enter text in typical input

methods and displayed in any human language.” (Hoffman, 2003) Efforts to internationalize HTML

(Yergeau et al, 1997) and FTP (Curtin, 1999) have also been undertaken with the goal of providing a

language- and nationality-agnostic platform for the internet. All of this highlights the fact that when a

typical user sits at their computer, there are several layers of abstraction between what they see on the

screen and what actual computing is being done in the CPU. The choices of language, display and

interface are all examples of things that are quite meaningful for human users, but utterly without

consequence to the actual processing that takes place on the circuit boards. Computers understands disk

partitions, not national borders.

The consequences of these practical decisions taken by network engineers and computer
programmers in the formative years of the internet remain with us today, and indeed provide the

foundation of the deterritorialized network identities that they have enabled. Common to each of these

standards agreements is the underlying attitude or ideology of openness, interoperability and distributed

authority that has been at the heart of the internet's incredible growth and infiltration into numerous

aspects of everyday life for many people. Each of these characteristics suggest a distinct departure from

the top-down, hierarchical system of organization preferred by nation-states in establishing power

structures, and instead established autonomy and openness as the guiding principles of a networked

structure of future development. As we shall see, there have been both significant benefits and serious

costs to this paradigm of the internet, and following the massive adoption that has occurred after the

opening of the internet in the mid 1990's there have been efforts to rein in or even fundamentally alter

these principles in the interest of commerce, security and national sovereignty (Talbot, 2005).

In the following section, I will describe the emergence of the deterritorialized network identity,

in particular as it has been observed following widespread public adoption of the internet in the past ten

to fifteen years. Drawing upon examples to demonstrate the gulf that has been observed between

network and national identities, I will suggest a framework for understanding the development of

network identities, and examine the degree to which such identities undermine the concept of a national

identity.

III. The Network Identity

The internet provides a common space for all users who can connect to it. In principle, the

internet that one user sees in one nation is the same internet that another user sees in another nation.

What, then, are the consequences of the presence of this globally-accessible shared space? In many

respects, and in most cases, we can generally state that it is an unqualified good that serves to better

connect geographically dispersed individuals into a globally integrated community. While access to

information and other forms of content was once restricted on the basis of cost, time and distance (that
is, the length and cost in time it took for the information to cross the distance between the point of

inception and the point of consumption), now that same information is immediately available to all

members of the network at the same time at often little or not cost.

Why might there be resistance to the principle of providing equal access to information through

the global networks of the internet? Here again we see a consequence of the network's disinterestedness

in the peculiarities of nation-states' territorial sovereignty. One factor that limited the ability of nation-

states to extend their influence was the difficulty of establishing authority and maintaining robust lines

of communication across long distances. Eventually, technologies such as the telegraph and the railroad

permitted national governments to conquer space and time with relative ease, although by the time

these technologies arrived on the scene many regions had settled on more modest boundaries than they

may have historically claimed. Nevertheless, the telegraph permitted the creation of standardized time

zones and reorganized life along the regulated rhythm of the clock (Carey, 1989). This technological

innovation in communications eventually paved the way for a global communications network like the

internet, and indeed the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) that was created in 1865 as one

of the very first international organizations, now has a writ that includes oversight of the World

Summit on the Information Society, which is a major working group for internet governance issues. As

is clear, the capability of information and communication technologies such as the internet to permit

communication across national borders represents a challenge to national sovereignty and authority, as

a given nation's ability to control the internet is limited to its own territory.

While a nation-state may have an interest in regulating or controlling access to information, the

network is only interested in increasing its reach and redundancy. Many of the most visible conflicts in

interests have to do with legal issues – as has been seen in the hard-fought battles related to intellectual

property on the internet. Determining and enforcing laws within a nation's territory is one of the most

basic exercises in sovereignty, and different countries come to different determinations on which laws

should be enacted. In the context of the freedom of expression, this means that a given expression may
not have the same legal status in two different nations. However, despite the existence of national

TLDs, there is nothing in the Internet Protocol that restricts or limits the access of those TLDs to

citizens or residents of that nation, and so users from one country may in principle visit websites that

are hosted in any other country, where they may see content that violates the user's national decency or

obscenity laws. Similarly, for popular websites and services that operate internationally it can be

maddening to attempt to screen the millions or billions of pieces of content that they serve for its legal

status in each nation.

YouTube, the video-sharing website, has on many occasions played host to content that was

deemed to violate the law in nations like Thailand, Turkey and Pakistan, leading to the site being

blocked by national telecom regulators in those countries (Rosen, 2008). The offending content in each

case were videos that, while insulting to revered national figures like Mustafa Kemal Attaturk or King

Adulyadej, fell well within free-speech protections guaranteed in the United States by the First

Amendment. If the servers containing the offending content are not in Thai or Turkish territory, yet the

videos are nonetheless accessible in those countries, what is the legal status of those videos? Certainly

Thai or Turkish governments can outlaw the viewing or display of expressions that are deemed

offensive, but they have little recourse against YouTube apart from the wholesale blocking of the entire

site if they cannot persuade YouTube's owner, Google, to remove the content. Pakistan, when acting to

block content that offended similar sensibilities in that country, accidentally blocked access to the

popular website for more than two hours, drawing attention to the global impact that national actions

can have across the internet as a whole (Sandoval, 2008).

Similarly, the web portal Yahoo ran afoul of obscenity laws in France in 2001 when an auction

site that it ran was found to be listing Nazi memorabilia for sale on its yahoo.fr domain (the sale of

Nazi symbols is illegal in France). Although Yahoo decided to remove the offending items from and

ban further sales of Nazi memorabilia, it insisted that it was doing so voluntarily and not pursuant to

any court order, arguing that the French courts had no jurisdiction over Yahoo's content, which was
located on servers in the United States (BBC, 2001). Again, the offending content was not held on

servers under the jurisdiction of the French courts, and yet French people were able to access the

offending content and some had been complaining about it. In this situation does the French law, which

is founded in a particularly French context (having fought against, and been occupied by, the Nazi's),

have authority over historical objects that may not be considered offensive (or at least not criminally

so) in another national context? Whose interests are paramount in this sort of disagreement? With large

internet firms like Yahoo and Microsoft setting up server farms around the world (Mehta, 2006), and

with the global quality of the network permitting data to be pulled from computers in distant places,

what is the significance of the territorial location of internet infrastructure?

Recently, the operators of the popular BitTorrent file-sharing website the Pirate Bay were

convicted in a Swedish court of assisting in copyright infringement, however because their servers are

not located in Sweden, the site continues to operate to this day (Pfanner, 2009). What does it mean for

intellectual property rights when Hollywood studios follow a trail of American content pirates that

leads to another country? If American consumers can access content via a BitTorrent tracker in

Sweden, and download it with the distributed assistance of peers in many other nations, then which

national authority is responsible for policing such activity? And what, if anything, would have been the

consequence of a successful bid by the organization to buy the micro-(non)nation of Sealand in an

effort to establish a 'copyright-free nation' (Beschizza, 2007)? Clearly, the problems presented by the

deterritorialized nature of the internet confound the capabilities of individual nations acting alone and

demand international coordination to resolve. Yet this cooperation is not always readily found.

In the immediate aftermath of their conviction for assisting copyright infringement, the Pirate

Bay posted a message on their website presumably intended to reassure their users, but also insightfully

encapsulating the notion of a network identity. The message read: “Don't worry - we're from the

internets [sic]. It's going to be alright.” While perhaps intended as a cheeky thumbing-of-the-nose at the

Swedish prosecutors and copyright holders who pressed the case against them, this comment is a
revealing articulation of a kind of network identity. The suggestion that one can be 'from' the internet

posits an identity that is removed from the physical, territorial concerns so central to the national

identity. This is the network identity that comes into being in the social space of the internet, where

users are unbound from the ethnic, cultural, national and other identities that are imposed upon them by

forces beyond their control. Offline, one cannot control the gender that they were born, the ethnic

group to which they belong by virtue of their genes, or the nation of which they are a citizen as a

consequence of their birth. Online, however, one's network identity is created through a series of

decisions, actions and disclosures that are more or less under the user's control. Heretofore hard and

fast identities such as gender can be, and are, swapped (Yee, 2006). User identities, though perhaps

becoming more tied to real life identities in some respects due to the trends of the reigning social

network sites (SNS) that encourage such transparency, are nonetheless entirely voluntary, and

anonymity is still the norm for many users in their interactions with others online.

Likewise, politically or culturally marginalized identities that are unable to find themselves

represented within the national culture of the state in which they live are able to find virtual

communities of support online, built on the basis of a shared ethnic or racial identity (Parham, 2004).

These diasporic communities serve to connect individuals with others who share their ethnic or racial

identity, although this may come at the expense of the establishment of their new national identity.

Consider a migrant who enters a new nation. Rather than absorb the national culture through the

process of assimilation, they may decide instead to maintain their pre-existing identity. While in the

past this would have been a difficult and perhaps eccentric decision (and one that should give the

nation-state that has naturalized this new resident cause for concern), the modern systems of global

communication permits a person to maintain the use of their native language and their participation in

the culture of their original home country. Among the participants in their diasporic community would

no doubt be other expatriates and migrants who had likewise left the home country. Through their

maintenance of a common space to practice and retain their ethnic or racial identity by participating in
the collaborative process of developing imagined communities (Anderson, 1983), despite their absence

from the real territory and community that they are attempting to recreate in a virtual space, these

migrants engage in the creation and maintenance of network identities that represent them as a group

online.

The relationship between network identities and Anderson's conception of the imagined

community is not dissimilar. Anderson writes: “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that

may prevail in each [community], the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”

(ibid: 7) Similarly, among internet identities, there are conceptions of a kinship among internet users,

that they have similar expectations and values related to the open access of information, and of free

communication across geographies. As we have seen, these expectations frequently come into conflict

with the interests and expectations of nation-states, who attempt to enforce their will through

regulations on telecommunications companies, internet service providers and media content

distributors.

So how can we speak of a framework for understanding this networked identity? It is an identity

that is informed by the libertarian principles of openness and freedom of action that were inscribed by

the founders and developers of the network. It is also an identity which values the sharing of programs

and content among users for the mutual enrichment of all, and establishes collaborative projects and

organizations as a means of preserving the collective intelligence of the network. Through the

development of user-contributed works, including everything from the content that a user reads online,

to the internet browser software that they utilize to display that content, to the markup language that

permits the content to be displayed, to the server software that is employed to connect a user to that

content, and even the network architecture that was developed within consensus-based working groups

to manage the connection of the user to that content, users participate in creating the shared network

identity of the internet every time they forward an email, conduct an internet search or solve a

reCAPTCHA. This participatory component of the network identity reflects the interactive nature of
the internet, and finds its expression in the increasingly standardized tools of community websites.

These include the creation of individual user 'profiles' common on social network and other social

media sites, as well as the user contribution of content ranging from actions as discrete as 'tagging'

(categorizing) a photograph, or as public as a posting a microblog status update. Common to each of

these expressions of the network identity are the elements of collaboration and participation, the very

same values that Steve Crocker sought to engender in contributions to the Request For Comment series

from the very beginning of the internet.

IV. Network Identities and Cyber-Security

Given that network identities have emerged as a competitor to national identites, one that

encourage users to participate in the development of such a deterritorialized and transnational project as

the internet, how do nation-states respond to this challenge to their authority and influence over their

citizens? In the remaining section of this paper I will discuss the ways in which the nation-state has

pushed back against threats to its sovereignty, and conclude with some remarks on the future

ramifications of the still-widening gulf separating national identities from the emerging network

identity.

Beyond questions of socialization and integration, network identities can threaten national

identities as a consequence of their ability to enable criminal activity on a more sophisticated and

dangerous level. Decentralized information and communication technologies enabled by the internet

permit the remote planning, monitoring and execution of criminal and terrorist schemes (Lenk, 1997).

While nation-states take efforts to protect the territorial integrity of their nation from invasion by

foreign armies, the avenues to the center of their networked communication infrastructure are highly

accessible and exposed (Castells, 2001: 159). The challenge of instituting robust security of

communication networks while simultaneously ensuring their ordinary, open function have stymied

internet security specialists, and some have even suggested that the network, as currently organized, is
irretrievably insecure as a consequence of the essentially trust-based foundation of packet-switching

(Talbot, 2005).

With the increasingly widespread access to the internet among users from around the globe,

malevolent actors have found ample targets for their various activities, from identity theft and credit

card fraud, to industrial espionage and the construction of massive botnets (Weber, 2007). Botnets are

collections of hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of ordinary user's computers that have been

infected by malware intended to combine the processing power and bandwidth of many individual

machines for the purpose of sending spam emails or conducting malicious denial of service attacks to

knock websites and other internet services offline by flooding them with more requests than the server

can handle. This form of distributed computing is not unlike much more benign programs such as

Folding@Home, which employs idle computer's bandwidth and computing power to conduct intensive

calculations in an effort to simulate protein folding and other molecular dynamics, but of course applies

the same principle of combined computing power to decidedly less beneficial ends.

Confronted with the fact that thousands of their own computers may well be compromised by

such botnets, how are national governments to respond to this threat? The hackers who develop and

deploy botnets can sometimes be pinpointed and arrested or neutralized, but their creations live on until

infected users format their hard drives or otherwise remove the malicious programs from their

computers. Pervasive security threats also endanger expensive and highly-classified military networks

and hardware. The greater their reliance on networked communications become, the more susceptible

societies become to threats to their national communications infrastructure. And now, America's

critical infrastructure are largely networked and exposed to the kind of vulnerabilities that should

certainly concern American policymakers and defense experts. Notably, the Obama administration has

suggested that it will announce the formation of a cyber warfare command in the American defense

apparatus, which will be responsible for hardening and defending American military and critical

infrastructure networks (Gorman & Dreazon, 2009). By breaking out cyber defense as requiring its own
command structure, it appears that the administration and defense department take this challenge

seriously.

Reports have also noted that the United States has trained itself for substantial offensive

cyberwarfare tactics should the need arise, including potential pre-emptive strikes to disable or render

inert dangerous viruses and botnets (Sanger, et al, 2009). It is hard to know what the effectiveness of a

pre-emptive cyber-war strike would be, but it should be noted that the risks are high for states engaging

in cyber-warfare. Sustained attacks by black hat operators marshaling large botnets against American

networks can be carried out by relatively few individuals, and in principle from any place in the world.

These actors may also be savvy hackers who are adept at hiding their location or true identity, and the

danger of a pre-emptive strike would be hitting the wrong target and suffering a retaliatory blow in

response. An policy of mutually-assured destruction is not tenable in cyber-warfare when your

opponent may only be borrowing their infrastructure for the purposes of their attack, and have no

qualms about sacrificing it in the service of achieving their strategic goals.

Complicating these issues are the emerging paradigms of cyber-warfare wherein non-state

actors conduct campaigns in tandem with, or even independently of, state actions. From the perspective

of a national government, it can be quite difficult to determine whether or not malevolent hackers are

operating under the instruction of a rival national government, or simply in solidarity with it.

Obviously, the political and strategic ramifications can considerably hamper retaliatory action, as

holding a host state responsible for the actions of rogue citizens of that state would introduce a

troublesome precedent; how could a state be confident that similarly nationalistic hackers in their own

territory would not expose them to similar retaliation? Indeed, given the ease of international travel,

what would stop agent provocateur's from entering a country and the perpetrating such an attack to

provide their own state with the justification to respond? With a good enough understanding of IP

masking or other techniques of misdirection, hackers could conceivably give the impression of a

foreign cyber-attack without even leaving their home nation. Similar to our earlier discussion of the
difficulty of applying national legal jurisdiction on the deterritorialized internet, the global distribution

and accessibility of the network permits any sufficiently motivated actor, anywhere, to assault any

other connected target, no matter where they are physically located in relation to their attacker.

Further emphasizing the value that information and communication technologies have for

asymmetrical warfare, we can see the deployment of civilian technologies being employed by militants

in their clashes with nation-states. During the recent attacks in Mumbai, India, terrorists reportedly

gathered intelligence in the midst of the 3-day battle by watching live television news feeds in the

hotels that they had taken over, and also conferred by satellite phone with individuals in Pakistan who

were relaying tactical information gleaned from news reports (Frater, 2008). A scare shook the

microblogging service Twitter when Indian authorities posted a directive that users not post any tactical

details (such as a the movements of commando units outside the hotels), implying that the terrorists

inside were keeping tabs on those updates (Wolfe, 2008). After the attacks, calls were even made to

restrict access to Google's mapping software, Google Earth, because it was alleged that the terrorists

used it to plan their attack (Bedi, 2008).

What is clear from these examples is that the access to valuable real-time information is no

longer limited to the high commands and intelligence services of national militaries, but rather has been

distributed throughout the network for any actor that can access them. Maps, satellite photos and

descriptions of the layout of the hotels are available on tourist resources and websites for

reconnaissance purposes. Additionally, sophisticated and widely dispersed communication

technologies allow actions to be commanded remotely, even piggy-backing onto the more expensive

satellite infrastructure of the international news media to provide live intelligence. It does not seem far-

fetched to imagine criminals and terrorists employing the latest tools of real-time information gathering

like microblogging services, voice over internet protocol, and lifestreaming video broadcasts as a

mechanism of increasing the effectiveness of their efforts without a major investment in infrastructure,

and criminal networks already employ many of the legacy communication platforms of the internet
such as bulletin boards and chatrooms to plan and coordinate their activities across great distances.

These are unmistakably unintended consequences of the dogma of increasing access. What was

once the domain of privilege and clearance has now become available to anyone who can afford a

moderately priced computer and internet access. While the growth of a global internet has proven to be

a boon for so many millions of users who can now access information and communicate with distant

contacts, also serves those same functions for groups of geographically dispersed individuals who have

an interest in anonymous, real time communication. Whether there is any way to deny terrorists access

to the net is unknown, although probably highly unlikely without major changes in the way that access

to the network is manged and authenticated. So long as users place a high value on anonymity and

network neutrality, then the potential will remain for malevolent actors, both on an individual level and

an organized political level, to organize, plan, and launch attacks against others connected to the

network.

V. Conclusion

When the internet was first launched, the network's creators could not have conceived how

deeply it would embed itself in the daily lives of people around the world in such a short period of

time. The internet provides numerous benefits to its more than one billion users, but it provides

precious little in the way of administrative controls. This is in line with the general libertarian ethos of

the hackers and researchers who developed most of the protocols that now run the internet, and it has

served the internet well for the first forty years of its existence. Now that the internet is reaching a

volume of users in the billions, stresses are being put on the system that may not have been anticipated.

Still, the diagnosis is not all bad by any means. The internet has provided a means of access to

information that has connected more humans with relevant information than ever before in history. The

internet has been the meeting place for educators, urban planners, sociologists and revolutionaries for

decades now, and it will no doubt surprise us again before too long with more innovative uses to
further embed it in our everyday lives. The development of network identities may be threatening for

the continued dominance of national identities, but from the perspective of serving users they may be a

more useful mechanism for establishing identity than nationality in any case. With the rise of the

network society, the preeminent position of the nation-state in the conception of identity has lost some

relevance, particularly when compared with the internet's ability to connect groups whose relationship

is more meaningful than simply being born in the same national jurisdiction. While we can expect that

the nation-state will bemoan this relative diminishing of authority, we can rest assured that this decline

will not affect all nation-states equally; some nation-states will no doubt continue to be influential and

powerful actors that are able to enforce their will upon others, as they have been able to in the previous

system. The difference now will be that instead of being the big boss at the top of the org chart, nation-

states will be just another node in the network connecting human identities through a web of

association, relevance and community. In this network society, we may say that our identity does not

come from a nation; it comes from the internets.

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