70
A Democratic Licence to Operate
communications has largely stemmed from their own available access. As one analysis
puts it: ‘For the United States, it appears from recent disclosures that access to digital
data via the dominant US Internet companies has been especially important; for the
United Kingdom and France, for historical and geographical reasons, submarine-cable
access has featured; for Germany, satellite access; for China and Russia, digital computer
network exploitation appears from the cyber-security press to have been highly
productive in recent years’.56 In smaller countries, intelligence agencies frequently try
to gain access to local commercial mobile networks, or simply rely on access to social
media to monitor groups or public trends.
3.96
Even the biggest and most capable of intelligence agencies, therefore, rely on close cooperation with other intelligence services in like-minded countries alongside partnerships
of varying intensity with a range of other foreign countries. For the UK, the Five Eyes
intelligence relationship between the UK, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand has
been particularly important. Between the access the US previously had through US
Internet companies and UK access to submarine-cable traffic, the potential of their joint
monitoring capabilities has undoubtedly been high.
International Politics
3.97
The global nature of the Internet represents a new domain of international competition
between traditional states. The adversaries of Western democracies have observed
for themselves the potential power of Internet-based technologies. There is extensive
evidence that some autocracies use their own state resources to stifle domestic dissent
and pursue dissenters by localising, as far as they can, Internet access. There have been
demonstrable efforts in countries such as Russia, China, North Korea and more recently
in Iran, not only to restrict the potential social impact of freely available information and
communication, but to turn the technology into new instruments of state control.57
3.98
This has direct relevance to security in the democratic world. Autocratic regimes that
operate blanket restrictions in their own societies are able to exploit the vulnerabilities
of a society heavily dependent on digital technology for many traditional adversarial
purposes: intelligence, subversion, industrial espionage, economic disruption and so on.
The cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007, widely believed to have originated from Russia, was
a clear attempt to create economic harm and damage the Estonian government. The
cyber-attack on Sony Pictures in 2014, widely attributed to North Korea, was apparently
an attempt to retaliate against what was perceived as a national insult. Some autocratic
56. David Omand, ‘Understanding Digital Intelligence and the Norms That Might Govern It’,
Global Commission on Internet Governance Paper Series, No. 8, CIGI/Chatham House, p. 8.
57. Rosemary d’Amour, ‘Authoritarian Regimes and Internet Censorship’, Center for
International Media Assistance, <http://www.cima.ned.org/authoritarian-regimesinternet-censorship/>; Robert Orttung and Christopher Walker, ‘Authoritarian Regimes
Retool Their Media-Control Strategy’, Washington Post, 10 January 2014; Shanthi Kalathil
and Taylor C Boas, Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on
Authoritarian Rule (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2003).