Fighting a war with no guns.

A government makes an unpopular move inciting popular unrest and some rioting. The real damage happens when the rioting moves to the ubiquitous network that everyone in the country depends on for virtually all activities. Rogue botnets infiltrate computers around the world which in turn become “zombies,” attacking the websites of newspapers, banks, and even leaving the country’s Parliament without email communication for days. Other countries move in to help identify and stop the attackers and 19-year old man is arrested as the mastermind behing the entire operation.

A new sci fi novel? No. Real events that happened in Estonia the last few weeks after the government removed a statue of a WW II soviet soldier. The NY Times has a great article on the events that took place between April 26th and May 19th in the small Baltic state.

As networked technologies, especially Internet-based ones, become both ubiquitous and central to every day life, our vulnerabilities increase as well. The Internet, as a physical network, is built to withstand all kinds of attacks and survive. It’s redundant and resilient in its design. But the information and services that use the Internet are much more vulnerable. Disrupting key applications such as email, banking, and web access, can cripple an organization as small as a tiny start-up and as large as the U.S. At the country level it could mean disruption of food and water supplies, electricity, and medical services. That could be enough to start physical (not virtual) unrest and violence among the population. In the end, a country can be destroyed from the inside out, without a single bullet being shot.

This may sound extreme and speculative, but with talk of countries like the U.S., Russia, and China developing information warfare programs, the prospect of wars fought at the information level becomes more real everyday.

Radical transparency and the death of spin.

I often talk to my students about the power of today’s networked information environment in shaping reputation. Keeping secrets has become extremely difficult, for businesses, politicians, and even 15-year-olds. All you need is one person (often yourself) to put the information in digital format and post it somewhere where others can read it. The network effect can be frightening. In a matter of minutes, it can become world-wide news. And even if you take the information down, it will always exist, cached on servers everywhere just waiting to be found. The result can be tremendous pressure on companies and politicians to clean up their act and be accountable. And I’ve always told my students, some of whom are budding CEOs and CIOs themselves, that the way to control your reputation is not by controlling information that is made public, but by making more information public yourself.

Well, enter Wiredmagazine, which has done a fantastic job in reporting on this idea and giving it a cool name: radical transparency. It has several articles on the subject but this one in particular tells the story beautifully. In fact, the whole article was written in the author’s blog inviting reader feedback, some of which is featured in the printed article. As the article’s author, Clive Thompson, says:

The Internet has inverted the social physics of information. Companies used to assume that details about their internal workings were valuable precisely because they were secret. If you were cagey about your plans, you had the upper hand; if you kept your next big idea to yourself, people couldn’t steal it. Now, billion- dollar ideas come to CEOs who give them away; corporations that publicize their failings grow stronger. Power comes not from your Rolodex but from how many bloggers link to you – and everyone trembles before search engine rankings.

Some of you may be thinking: What about industrial secrets? The secret recipe of Coke? As Clive points out:

[Some of my blog readers] enjoyed ripping apart my new theories. Several pointed out that secrecy can be necessary – CEOs are often required by law to keep mum, and many creative endeavors benefit from being closed: Steve Jobs came up with a terrific iPhone precisely because he acts like an artist and doesn’t consult everyone. In fact, secrecy is sometimes part of the fun. Who wants to know how this season of 24 is going to end? It’s not secrets that are dying, as one reader named gjudd noted, but lies.

Secrets can be useful tools for competitive advantage. Even though there are many cases when even those secrets are better left in the open. Just look at the success of all the open-source software out there.

So it’s not secrets that are dying. It’s spin control that’s dying. This spells trouble for PR firms.

What’s making me even more excited is the impact this is already starting to have on politics, where transparency is a dirty word and spin control is god. Remember George Allen’s “macaca” comment that got posted on YouTube and cost him a Senate seat?

Politics is going to be fun again.

The Web, politics, and information transparency, by Jon Stewart.

Today, I was going to write about how the incredible information transparency of the web is completely changing the political environment by putting more pressure for accountability and truthfulness on politicians and political candidates while also allowing for the apparent trivialization of politics (which is actually just the exposure of politics for the tragicomic meaningless theater that they’ve become).

But then I saw this clip from The Daily Show (Note: WordPress doesn’t allow embedding videos from Comedy Central, hence the plain old link) and I realized that I could never explain all of that as clearly and as funny as Jon Stewart always does. Enjoy.