Schneier on Security

jones • October 17, 2015 10:48 AM

Military strategist Steven Metz discussed some of the implications of this in “Which Army After Next?” published in Parameters, 1997:

A final plausible future security system is one where war is less an extension of politics than of business. Corporations, cartels, and states might use violence and coercion–whether traditional, physically destructive violence or new forms such as cyberviolence or psychological violence–to attain access to resources and markets or deny it to others. Organized violence itself may become a common commodity sold on contract. As states and their militaries prove less capable of meeting the security threats of the future, people, organizations, and businesses might look for other sources of security. More and more of the functions now performed by state militaries thus would be assumed by transnational security or mercenary firms or by the security divisions of transnational corporations.

In a security system where warfare was commercialized, many of the United States’ core strategic concepts would be inapplicable. For instance, the US military could no longer count on the qualitative superiority that has served it so well since the end of World War II. Against high-tech mercenaries, corporate militaries, private armies hired by enemy states, or armed criminal cartels, the US military might have to switch to a Soviet-style strategy using numbers and mass to compensate for qualitative inferiority. The United States would also have to rethink its basic understanding of the rules of warfare when faced with issues like the appropriateness of declaring war, forming alliances, or signing treaties with non-state entities.

There will be no technical solution to the security problems created by pervasive networking. Dan Geer is right: the only safe route is to minimize the extent to which you allow these technologies into your life.

Realpolitik would say that under
such circumstances, defense becomes irrelevant. What is relevant
is either (1) offense or (2) getting out of the line of fire
altogether. States that are investing in offense are being entirely
rational and are likely to survive. Those of us who are backing
out our remaining dependencies on digital goods and services are
being entirely rational and are likely to survive. The masses who
quickly depend on every new thing are effectively risk seeking, and
even if they do not themselves know it, the States which own them
know, which explains why every State now does to its own citizens
what once States only did to officials in competing regimes.

Get real. You can’t have iPhones and privacy. It won’t happen.