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Internet Sovereignty as a Gateway to Global Norms: The Battle over Global Internet Governance

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by Eve Gleeson

18 July 2019

A borderless world, or not really? (Image credit: Pxhere)

Introduction

The Internet’s essence as “open, global, [and] borderless” has complicated attempts toward international cooperation on Internet governance. Many authoritarian states with comprehensive cybersecurity policies and strategies regard the Internet as a tool to monitor and quell internal dissent that may threaten regime stability, while liberal democracies, especially those belonging to Western multilateral organisations such as the EU and NATO, have tended to conceive of it rather as a borderless space free from excessive regulation.

Authoritarian states, such as Russia, China and the states with whom they maintain rather informal ties, such as Iran and Southeastern Asian states like Malaysia and Indonesia, clash with the proponents of liberal democracy whose values traditionally prevail in international institutions. As leaders of the Internet Sovereignty (IS) movement, China and Russia hope to use their growing diplomatic influence to manipulate global Internet governance standards in favour of state sovereignty. This article will discuss how the values of IS may impact the global power balance and a transnational Internet governance agreement, stressing the position of Russia and China in global diplomatic bodies.

Transnational cybersecurity governance

Bodies like the UN and its agency the International Telecommunications Union have created and reviewed numerous initiatives concerning transnational Internet protocols. However, these initiatives have proved to be vague and incomplete strategies victim to gridlock and technical limitations. IS leaders Russia and China and their increasingly potent force of global Internet allies remain challenged by Western actors, such as the United States, who benefit from institutionalised power and market-dominating private technology companies.

Bilateral and multilateral cooperation in this area has been prolific as powerful states seek to gain Internet allies who may represent their interests at the global negotiating table. This includes the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, an alliance originally designed to combat terrorism but has since ushered its eight members, hailing from South and Central Asia, toward strategies and norms that speak to the threat that information poses to national security and stability. Other occurrences of inter-group cooperation are reflected through signatures on UN resolutions by band-wagoning states, including by developing states in Latin America, Africa and Asia, as well as collaborations on global Internet conferences.

China and Russia: Messiahs of Internet Sovereignty

These states serve as beacons of hope for national jurisdiction over the digital space, serving up bold cybersecurity policies and strategies. With landmark policies like the Golden Shield and the Great Firewall, and technology giants like Huawei and Alibaba, China has become a leader of technological prosperity. Russia has created similarly robust Internet policies in addition to several market-dominating technology companies including Yandex and Kaspersky Lab. This has given the Russian state the capacity to expel Western technology companies, bolster the national economy, and monopolise national identity creation through social media censorship.

Chinese policies of filtering and censoring content reflect the ideals of state control over national identity, information access, dissent and mobilisation, and emerging technologies. China’s investment in the telecommunications sectors of East African states (linked with their adoption of Chinese-inspired censorious cybersecurity policies) and policy leadership in the SCO and BRICS partnerships reflect the state’s efforts to “promote [their views] as the basic principles for structuring international relations and regimes on a global level.”

In 2015, China and Russia formalised their bilateral cybersecurity relations with the Agreement on International Information Security Cooperation. Russia has also forged formal cybersecurity ties with less advanced emerging economies, such as Southeast Asia through an emerging agreement with ASEAN and existing cybersecurity collaboration with the Philippines. In addition, Russia has used the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, an alliance comprised of former Soviet satellite states, as a tool to consolidate a collective cybersecurity strategy. By combatting Western technological dominance, both materially and normatively, Russia and China can expand their own industries, retain control over their population, and spread non-Western ideals among states who may, in turn, provide support to them in international fora.

Implications and Conclusion

A global Internet governance regime ruled by IS ideals, whether it be a codified UN agreement or more informal norms and practices, would not mirror the hierarchical structure of traditional governance bodies: instead, it would create no order of power at all, with each individual state executing autonomy over Internet activity within its borders. This sort of agreement may also impact how cybersecurity development programs are funded, with resistance from China and Russia for developing states to receive development aid from the West.

Such a collaborative agreement may also struggle to set human rights and transparency norms. By granting states autonomy in this arena, it would relinquish authority over domestic consequences of Internet policies. This would leave states with a pre-modern degree of sovereignty, allowing them to steer the Internet toward or away from state-based information and knowledge control, political mobilisation, and national identity creation. Russia and China’s efforts toward Internet sovereignty norms will persist as they advance their interests of building a strong anti-West alliance. As they grow as economic powers, their efforts to integrate Westphalian values of sovereignty into international institutions will grow in tandem, threatening liberal ideals of globalisation.

So far, the transnational agreements that have been proposed, amended, and rejected have encountered fragmentation, ambiguity, and logistically-weak imperatives. The economic and infrastructural disparities between states, the struggle for policy to outpace technological advances, the role of private stakeholders that uphold the industry, and the logistical impracticalities of enforcing Internet policies have all stifled ventures toward global cooperation. In addition to resolving these issues, states must realistically engage in compromise to construct a functional regime.

Eve Gleeson is a master’s student in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, as well as the Communications Manager of Strife and a security analyst at AMC Solutions. Her research focuses on technology governance, cybersecurity of critical systems, and socio-technical theory. Eve holds a BA in International Studies with a focus on conflict and security from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. You can find her on LinkedIn and on Twitter @evegleeson_.

‘Authentication – Crypto-Wars’ new frontline

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By: Yuji Develle

keys

Image credit: https://netzpolitik.org/wp-upload/23390123_b6caaefc16_o.jpg

9 February, 2016: the FBI requested Apple to unlock an iPhone device belonging to a suspect of the San Bernardino terror shootings. Given until 26 February to respond, Apple flatly refused. So began a drawn out legal battle and ongoing public debates surrounding the merits of encryption, pitting the national security community and the tech-world against each other. Captains of industry and five-star generals faced-off in fiery declarations. As the FBI hired Japan-based Sun Corp to unlock the iPhone for close to $1 million, WhatsApp (April 5th) and Viber (April 18th) both raced to complete end-to-end encryption roll-out on their products. Across the pond, just last week the second reading of the was discussed in the House of Lords. This Bill appeared just steps away from authorising state-sanctioned “equipment interference”. Reaching a new zenith, a new chapter in the Crypto-Wars has begun.

Most “battles” in this Crypto-War occur in the legal and policy spheres. This is primarily due to requirement that intelligence services and law enforcement have to request the right to access the encrypted data of individuals in specific cases (lawful intercept). Lawful Intercept has been a hallmark of the telecoms industry for decades, as network managers were compelled by the law to provide data that may help with criminal investigations. As made apparent to the British public in the public uproar created by the ‘Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA 2000)’ (Snooper’s Charter) and the recent ‘Investigatory Powers Bill’, many policy-makers are striving to create greater legal leeway for intelligence and law enforcement. Meanwhile, academics such as Thomas Rid (Rise of the Machines) from the War Studies Department at King’s College London, have discussed the place of encryption in society’s moral-compass, whether such leeway is morally justifiable. Legal, policy and academia interact reflexively in a constantly shifting Crypto-War landscape.

However, an aspect of this conflict is certain. Both the national security establishment and the tech-world are developing surveillance and encryption technologies far faster than laws or policy. Just as Daniel Moore’s and Thomas Rid’s Cryptopolitik & the Darknet exposed the critical chasm between Westminster’s understanding of the Darknet and real traffic trends, the available technologies driving encryption out-pace the current laws sanctioning “equipment interference”. These technologies cover a variety of areas such as F-Secure’s Freedome (better VPNs) or Silent Circle’s head-to-toe phone encryption, but appear most notably in the field of web authentication.

The very fabric of the internet hinges on the idea of trust. Without trust, it would be impossible to be certain that a file from Mr. Smith actually comes from Mr. Smith. E-Commerce, E-Banking and in particular E-Voting rely on the trust of both their users and their servers to function properly. One major structure in charge of maintaining this trust is web authentication, or the structures of authentication and certification in place to make sure, for instance, that a certain ‘Mr. Smith’ is actually who he says he is. Currently one system, the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), dominates this space since the Internet’s humble beginnings.

The Public Key Infrastructure is a centralised model of assigning a certain number (or key) to each individual machine attempting to gain access to a given server on the internet. If Alice wishes to access a server, she will be put through a multi-step process before gaining access to that server:

Multi-Step

  1. 1) A Registering Authority (RA) notes down Alice’s Public Key (unique credentials)
  2. 2) A Certificate Authority (CA) notes down the Public Key onto a Central Directory
  3. 3) The CA issues a certificate based on Alice’s Public Key, this certificate is Alice’s digital signature.
  4. 4) This signature is matched with the Server’s Private Key to grant access
  5. 5) The signature is verified again by a Validation Authority, in charge of double-checking the validity of digital signatures/certificates.

It is quickly apparent how such a system may lead to serious vulnerabilities. The Public Key Infrastructure is a chain of events that relies on the integrity of the initial Public Key, and on the reliable denotation of this key in each following step. Alice’s identity on the internet is directly bound to her key. Due to this, after having been registered by RAs, Public Keys are stored by CAs in “Central Directories”. The PKI paradigm relies on storing this type of identification information on supposedly “air-tight” info-caches.

Similar to how keeping a list of username and password pairings in an office drawer, “Central Directories” are inherently dangerous and have been the cause of some of the largest security breaches in web history (See 2011 DigiNotar Breach). The repeated communication between different steps of the PKI also mean that “Replay” attacks are easier to undertake, such as when a hacker eavesdrops until they are able to replicate a given communication/operation. Moreover, governments have worked with other companies in issuing fake certificates to sanctioned spyware and malware. One example being Gogo Inflight Internet’s alleged use of Google certificates, as sanctioned by the FCC shown in this letter. The top 5 Certificate Authorities are all based in the United States – food for thought!

In light of these bedrock vulnerabilities, the tech-world has been busy. The Web of Trust model, gives the freedom to each network to gradually accumulate their list of “trusted introducers”, or trusted users, placed on a White-list. The idea is that the more White-list users are placed, the more authentic one becomes. This circumvents the need to pass through CAs hundreds of times, as is usually the case with any given web-application. The Distributed Trust model is the most innovative, however.

Distributed Trust

A Distributed Trust Infrastructural Model

In a D-TA model, Alice would for instance, only have to supply two different pieces of information (Step 1: Multi-Factor Authentication), a pin code and the fact that she is using Google Chrome (logo shown in Safari), before being assigned a “Unique Cryptographic Authentication Key” (Step 2) and thus accessing the server. Alice did not have to surrender any passwords, keys or personal information to any “Central Directories” to be identified and authenticated. To prove that Alice’s pin and browser-type is correct, the information is matched with two or more partial key-holders (called “Trusted Authorities” or TA). The TAs constitute a block-chain of key-parts that together form the key. At no time does any TA have access to the full key, nor does any information get stored on any registry. Every authentication key is unique.

The Distributed Trust model eliminates two of the most damaging sources of cyber-breaches: password-related breaches and ‘Man-in-the-Middle’ attacks. Without any directories to poach information from, this near-eliminates the possibility of ID-theft (think: 2014 OPM Hack, last April’s Mexican Voter Breach, the LinkedIn Breach). More relevant to the Crypto-Wars, this technology prevents a common-method with which governments agencies – including intelligence services – implanted spyware into social-media, e-mail, and banking apps. At the same time, Distributed Trust would protect every government server from sophisticated attacks. Eliminating the need for passwords and/or public-key registries makes web-security truly air-tight.

In light of the resurgence of Crypto-Wars in public debate, the fate of Distributed Trust hangs in the balance. Should governments prove to make headway in adopting Distributed Trust, this would limit Opposition parties (in some countries) and Hacktivists from penetrating public servers. While widespread private-sector adoption would lead to a much more secure internet, it would remove many of the spy tools available to law enforcement and intelligence services (those being made legal by “Electronic Surveillance”).

Yuji Develle, is an Undergraduate Representative and Editor for Strife Blog. A French and Japanese War Studies graduate; he is currently working for a London start-up specialised in cryptography. His interests lie in cybersecurity, energy security and other emerging security issues.

PROXY Capabilities – Costs and burden sharing in Draft Investigatory Powers Bill: The battle between the Home Office and communication service providers

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This is the fifth piece in a series of articles we will be featuring on Strife in the coming week looking at the role of Proxy Warfare in the 21st century by Series Editor Cheng Lai Ki. Previous articles in the series can be found here.

By: Mustafa Batuhan Albas

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Data storage towers. Source: Wikimedia

On 4 November 2015, the UK government published a draft bill that aimed to (re)regulate the investigatory powers used by its law enforcement, intelligence, and security agencies. The new Draft Investigatory Powers Bill was quick to create controversy and scrutiny on encryption, the use of equipment interference, and the acquisition of bulk data along with other issues. Most importantly, the bill seeks to create ‘a new statutory basis for the retention and acquisition of communications data’[1] through which the government will require communication service providers (CSPs) to store details of websites accessed by all UK web users for twelve months. These details are called ‘Internet Connection Records’ (ICRs).[2]

Early parliamentary scrutiny revealed that the government estimates the capital cost of collecting and retaining ICRs will amount to £174 million over ten years, it is however not as clear to this day whether the government is willing to cover 100% of the possible costs although it said it would ‘make reasonable cost provision’.[3] The bill since passed its Second Reading on 15 March 2016, but the issue regarding the costs remains in a rather puzzling state. A battle is thus raging silently between service providers and the government.[4] But why has the Home Office gone ahead with publishing the draft bill in the first place?

The UK signals intelligence, a resource constrained domain

The United Kingdom has a robust security apparatus, best exhibited through their efficient intelligence services and their integral role within the Five Eyes Alliance. However, the country has consistently been troubled by one question since the end of Second World War: ‘the growing importance and the rising costs of SIGINT’.[5] Even during its early days, the problem for GCHQ was ‘trying to keep pace with…the NSA, which seemed to have limitless supplies of money’.[6] This problem remains chronic. In 2014, Charles Farr of the Home Office attested that ‘US intelligence agencies are far larger and much better resourced than the [UK] Intelligence Services’ and hence could ‘provide the UK with the intelligence that the UK –with its far more limited resources– could not realistically obtain by itself’.[7] Particularly regarding data retention, the cost of NSA’s Utah Data Centre alone is approximately three times as expensive as the entire complex in which GCHQ currently resides.[8] [9] This reality is one of the driving incentives behind why the government is trying to use CSPs as proxies and share the burden of responsibilities in a domain in which the costs are a legitimate concern.

Cost of ICRs and the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill

According to the Office for National Statistics, 86% of the households (22.5 million) in the UK had internet access in 2015, with 78% of the adults (39.3 million) using it every day.[10] With the use of multiple gadgets (computers, tablets, smartphones, etc.) and multi-tab browsing habits (maintaining more than one connection at a time), collecting and retaining ICRs could prove to be very costly, even in its most basic form. The bill thus contains certain opportunities for the government in its current state, especially regarding cost management. It is also considerably different than the previous legislation, where CSPs were mostly obligated to retain the data they generated to provide their services.[11] A resource constrained UK government could now effectively force service providers to share the burden of collection and retention duties on a much broader scope. Some of these responsibilities are indeed trying to be outsourced to the providers mandatorily. The government ultimately has this ability to coerce, and the MPs have already acknowledged the possibility of such scenario –that is, if someone does not ‘pick up the bill’.[12]

But would it be that easy? Communication service providers are definitely more vulnerable to government coercion than multinational technology firms. Big UK providers have their broadband networks that cross the entire country, and sometimes even provide access to these networks so that the smaller providers can carry their own services.[13] If the business conditions in the UK ultimately become less favourable, they do not seem to have the immediate luxury nor the ability to move the majority of their operations elsewhere.

The retention of ICRs will require the introduction of certain types of equipment such as deep packet inspection tools (DPI) to the CSP networks –a method that is already associated with high technical processing requirements (and consequently, with high financial costs).[14] Furthermore, there is the ongoing cost of maintenance and storage. One might think that the cost of storage has declined over the years, but the actual cost of bulk and enterprise storage is a lot more complicated than a ‘pennies per gigabyte’ approach, especially when the flow of data that needs to be stored is on a multi-terabyte (if not petabyte) scale. Moreover, the upwards trend in the use of data security technologies such as encryption[15] could further complicate defining what qualifies as an ICR. Less network visibility means that the packet inspection used to deliver ICRs needs more computing power and generates far more data. Service provider representatives acknowledge that this technology challenge is ‘not impossible, but it is very expensive’ as it already is.[16] The president of BT Security Mark Hughes said his company worked out £174 million just for themselves, whereas four mobile carriers stated that they alone could spend £247 million on ICRs. [17] The Home Office has been avoiding to make a clear commitment to cost recovery. This attitude was best exhibited when the Home Secretary Theresa May made contradicting references to reimburse both ‘reasonable operational costs’ and ‘100% of the compliance costs’ during the Second Reading. Service providers recently criticised May by saying that her statements ‘do not provide for the same coverage of costs’.[18]

Moving forward

It appears that the government’s attempt to impose these ambiguous terms and costs on the communication service providers is not going to be a linear process. Different committee reports, including that of the Joint Committee that was tasked specifically to scrutinise the bill, came out criticising the initial draft.[19] The issues regarding costs were strongly pronounced in at least two of these reports.[20] While agreeing with CSPs on vague cost projections of the Home Office, the Joint Committee also noted that they ‘do not agree that 100% cost recovery should be on the face of the Bill’.[21]

The scope of new obligations mandated under the bill are much bigger than any previous legislation, so are the possible costs. The Home Office will more likely need to explain better what it expects from the service providers amidst the criticism it is currently receiving. The Joint Committee report also suggested that ‘the Government should provide statutory guidance on the cost recovery models’.[22] This is a sensible recommendation, and the Home Office seems to be slowly taking notice of CSPs’ concerns.[23] It is understandable that the current opportunities the bill poses for the government are tempting, but the long-term viability of the bill lies in clarity and cooperation, not coercion nor alienation.

 

 

Mustafa Batuhan Albas is an MA Candidate in Intelligence and International Security at King’s College London. His research focus is on information security and its applications on intelligence gathering. He can be reach at @8thcolumn on Twitter.

 

 

 

Notes:

[1] Theresa May, “Draft Investigatory Powers Bill,” 2015, 12, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/473770/Draft_Investigatory_Powers_Bill.pdf.

[2] Home Office, “Investigatory Powers Bill Factsheet – Internet Connection Records,” 2015, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/473745/Factsheet-Internet_Connection_Records.pdf.

[3] House of Commons – Science and Technology Committee, “Oral Evidence: Investigatory Powers Bill: Technology Issues, HC 573 (Tuesday 8 December 2015)” (UK Parliament, 2015), http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/science-and-technology-committee/investigatory-powers-bill-technology-issues/oral/25740.html.

[4] Alan Travis, “Minister Has Not Fully Made Case for Snooper’s Charter, Says Committee,” The Guardian, February 11, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/11/ministers-not-conclusive-case-web-snoopers-charter.

[5] Richard J. Aldrich, “Counting the Cost of Intelligence: The Treasury, National Service and GCHQ,” English Historical Review 128, no. 532 (2013): 607, doi:10.1093/ehr/cet067.

[6] Ibid., 610.

[7] Privacy International, “Investigatory Powers Tribunal Case No. IPT/13/77/H,” 2014, 7–8, https://www.privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/Witness st of Charles Blandford Farr_0.pdf.

[8] US Domestic Surveillance Directorate, “Utah Data Center,” accessed February 16, 2016, https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/.

[9] Richard Norton-Taylor, “The Doughnut, the Less Secretive Weapon in the Fight against International Terrorism,” The Guardian, June 10, 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/jun/10/terrorism.Whitehall.

[10] Office for National Statistics, “Internet Access – Households and Individuals, 2015 – Statistical Bulletin,” 2015, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_412758.pdf.

[11] Calum Jeffray, “Understanding the Investigatory Powers Bill,” RUSI, 2015, https://rusi.org/sites/default/files/201511_bp_investigatory_powers_bill.pdf.

[12] House of Commons – Science and Technology Committee, “Oral Evidence: Investigatory Powers Bill: Technology Issues, HC 573 (Tuesday 8 December 2015).”

[13] Broadband Genie, “Rated Broadband Providers,” 2016, https://www.broadbandgenie.co.uk/broadband/providers.

[14] Niccolò Cascarano, Luigi Ciminiera, and Fulvio Risso, “Optimizing Deep Packet Inspection for High-Speed Traffic Analysis,” Journal of Network and Systems Management 19, no. 1 (2011): 8, doi:10.1007/s10922-010-9181-x.

[15] Klint Finley, “Encrypted Web Traffic More Than Doubles After NSA Revelations,” Wired, May 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/05/sandvine-report/.

[16] Joint Committee on the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, “Oral Evidence: Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, HC 651 (Wednesday 9 December 2015),” UK Parliament, 2015, http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/draft-investigatory-powers-bill-committee/draft-investigatory-powers-bill/oral/25977.html.

[17] Joint Committee on the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, “Oral Evidence: Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, HC 651 (Wednesday 13 January 2016),” UK Parliament, 2016, http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/draft-investigatory-powers-bill-committee/draft-investigatory-powers-bill/oral/26875.html.

[18] “Written Evidence: Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) (IPB31),” 2016, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmpublic/investigatorypowers/Memo/IPB31.pdf.

[19] Travis, “Minister Has Not Fully Made Case for Snooper’s Charter, Says Committee.”

[20] House of Commons – Science and Technology Committee, “Cost of Investigatory Powers Bill Could Undermine UK Tech Sector,” UK Parliament, 2016, http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/science-and-technology-committee/news-parliament-2015/investigatory-powers-bill-report-published-15-16/./

[21] Joint Committee on the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, “Draft Investigatory Powers Bill Report,” n.d., 68, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt201516/jtselect/jtinvpowers/93/93.pdf.

[22] Ibid., 10.

[23] Home Office, “Communications Data: Draft Code of Practice,” 2016, 96, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/505411/Communications_Data_draft_Code_of_Practice.pdf.

Virtual conflict as cultural catharsis: re-fighting Vietnam 2.0

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By Ben Collins:

Call of Duty: Private C Miller (by deviantArt user spyash2)
Private C Miller (by deviantArt user spyash2)

Storytelling is a core part of how we communicate with each other, understand complex issues and come to terms with the world around us. The prevalence of so-called ‘talking therapies’ show that such processes are important in helping to overcome and move past negative events and experiences. The experience of 9/11 left long-lasting and deep collective and cultural damage on the US/Western collective psyches. The ‘War on Terror’ has been compared to what Vietnam was for Lyndon Johnson: ‘a vast, tragic distraction in which he must be seen to be winning, lest the domestic agenda he really cares about be derailed.’[i] Popular culture, in this case Western-developed video/computer games, have become a medium in which the cathartic and curative process of storytelling is taking place on a cultural level, to move past and overcome both of these ‘unfinished’ conflicts.

War and conflict have been staple thematic topics in games for decades, as far back as Space Invaders and Missile Command in the late 1970s. However, the games released after 9/11 show an interesting pattern indicating a marked swing in direction and focus. Between 2002 and 2005 there were two games released that were set during the first Gulf War (Conflict: Desert Storm I & II), at least nine games released set during the Vietnam War (Vietcong, Vietcong 2, Battlefield: Vietnam, Conflict: Vietnam, Shellshock: ‘Nam 67, Wings over Vietnam, Platoon, Men of Valor, Line of Sight: Vietnam) as well as many more set in the modern day in real or analogous Middle-Eastern theatres. One of the most stand-out titles from this period was America’s 10 Most Wanted, whose finale consists of the player fighting Osama Bin Laden in hand-to-hand combat, and subsequently bundling him into a helicopter that flies off into the sunset while the credits roll. From this period mainstream game development began to shift to reflect changing current events. From 2008 games in this thematic field have often adopted Private Military Contractors in both pro and antagonistic roles. after the details of Blackwater’s/Xe’s involvement in Iraq became wider public knowledge and a hot topic of the time.

The ability of popular culture to serve as a space for cultural catharsis and as a coping mechanism isn’t a new one; after the collective cultural trauma of Vietnam a similar process of mourning and understanding took place. The trajectory of tone and content in the ‘war is hell’ films from the 1970s such as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter shifted dramatically to the restorative and cathartic films from the 1980s like Top Gun and Rambo. These films either painted the US military in a far more positive and victorious light or, in the case of Rambo, literally re-fighting Vietnam on-screen.

What is interesting is that in games after 9/11 this process moved in the opposite direction. The games that emerged in the first few years after 9/11 can broadly be interpreted as revenge power-fantasies. The largely tactical focus of these titles place the player in the position of a soldier with a ‘grunt’s-eye view’. This creates a space in which the player can rewrite history, restore agency and re-establish the ‘correct’ order of the world on an individual level; winning the battles AND winning the war. It is only in recent years that some developers have taken steps to question and critique what can be seen as a largely jingoistic and cynically simplified streamlining of complex geopolitical issues.

The 2012 game Spec Ops: The Line was a deeply critical response to the way in which war and conflict had been portrayed in games. Taking Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as inspiration, the game took a cynical approach to the increasingly detailed yet sanitised depiction of war. Starting out as a formulaic tale of Western intervention to help a sandstorm-buried Dubai, the game depicts ambiguous moral choices as well as civilian collateral damage in a highly critical and subversive way. The game makes the player stop to reflect on their actions, something that is normally outside the usually simplistic and circular justifications other games use for the violent acts that the player witnesses and facilitates. Similarly, the 2008 game Far Cry 2 borrows lightly from Heart of Darkness, taking place in a fictional African country in the grips of a civil war between two greedy and ruthless militias.

As western military involvement in the Middle East has, at least in the eyes of the western audiences, wound down to be out of sight and out of mind, western popular culture has adapted to react to new threats. Wikileaks, Anonymous and Edward Snowden are being explored as the new sources of cultural anxiety and trauma; Call of Duty: Black Ops II features a hacker antagonist, who in the near future takes control of the United States’ expanded drone forces. The recently released Watch_Dogs puts the player in the shoes of a skilled hacker in a near-future Chicago, and can be interpreted as a warning against the danger hackers pose to increasingly centralised and interconnected systems. At the same time it offers up a new revenge fantasy to anyone who has been the victim of the seemingly unending frauds, data thefts and security breaches of many internet-based services.

Why does this matter? The medium of games is a uniquely textured and tactile environment to continue the human necessity of storytelling; whether it be in moment-to-moment gameplay experiences or the underlying story or theme a particular game is exploring. A generation has grown up being bombarded with messages about the necessity for increased security, updates on the latest protracted conflict in a place they have never seen or heard of in any other context, and the constant threat of terrorism hanging over them like the sword of Damocles; all of this is delivered through a ubiquitous, 24-hour news media. It is entirely possible that games are the first instance of many people engaging with any of these topics on a participatory and interactive level. It is worth considering the way that game portray war and conflict, and how these messages are received by audiences due to the potential for their affecting of popular thought relating to real world events and issues. The condensing and streamlining of conflicts like Vietnam and the ‘War on Terror’ into simple and easily digestible narratives applies the same maximal and binary filtering logic of George W. Bush’s “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” speech. As a medium that lets us tell ourselves the stories through interactivity, games should be telling us what we need to know rather than what we want to hear. The difficult truths about these traumatic moments in our cultural memory are important. Without them the conflicts they depict will remain ‘unfinished’ and the cultural catharsis sought through them will remain out of reach.

 

_______________

Ben Collins is a 2nd year PhD student looking at hacker activists in comparison to 19th century Anarchism. Other focus includes how war and conflict are portrayed in videogames, as well as how players interact and question both the events in them and the relevant analogous real-world wars, conflicts and insurgencies we see in comparison.

 

NOTES

[i] M.S., The war on terror is Obama’s Vietnam, The Economist, 10/06/13, http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/why-we-spy, accessed 04/06/14