 This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly and this is the Cube Silicon Angles Wikibon's coverage of explorations in cyber-international relations. This is the fourth ECIR workshop. The conference today is really focused on cyber security and the governance gap. It's really the governance piece that really is getting a lot of attention. And it's our pleasure to have Nasli Shukri, who is the organizer of the conference as well as a professor of political science at MIT and author and very much pleased to have you here. Welcome to the Cube. Well, I'm delighted to be here. The weather is okay, but it's very sunny and very beautiful. This project is actually a collaboration with Harvard, and it's the first large-scale collaboration we've had on this kind of subject. And bringing the two cultures together was very interesting and very fruitful to do. I don't see that. I mean, everybody thinks Harvard and MIT are somewhat competitive, but you're collaborating. No, it's MIT and Harvard. Of course. I just go alphabetical. I'm sorry. So tell us about this event. This is the fourth conference, right? So tell us how it started and where it's come from. Well, it started by us proposing a project, a research project, responding to a request from the Department of Defense Minerva Program, which at the time was intended to help boost the social sciences. And the proposal that we presented and was funded was for a five-year analysis of the relationship between cyberspace and international relations. When we began, it looked as if these were parallel tracks, the cyber world, internet world, and the world of geopolitics, politics, the world we know something about. And our job was to find ways of integrating both. Now, what's very interesting is that the world out there integrated itself much faster than we have been able to develop the tools that would do the integration. So in a sense, there's a mutual development of the ideas and of the realities, and the speed with which this has happened has been amazing. We have actually the Bible that we were using to prepare for this event. Nozli's book on cyber politics, international relations, dog-eared, highlighted the works. But essentially, the premise of the book is as you just described is the pace of cyberspace and the permeation of cyberspace throughout society and commerce has grown much, much faster than our ability to keep up from an international geopolitical standpoint, and that's created a dissonance. And I guess events like this are attempts to try to close that gap, right? The policy side of this event is an attempt to understand how best to close that gap. And as you saw this morning, there were different points of views about which path to go, how to do it, et cetera. The other side of this is that the cyber domain, the internet, the physical mechanisms are multiplying, are developing, users are expanding. And it's very difficult to remember a world before the internet. And remember that the internet is just the core of the cyber domain. I'd like to think of cyberspaces and arena where we interact. But the mechanism through which we do this is, in first order, the internet. You had a nice chart this morning. You showed the traditional, the state. And then you had cyberspace and you had the environment and sort of three independent vectors, but you made the point that these are very much interrelated. And you also brought to our attention the threats of things like undersea cables, which I was surprised at how many hands went up when you asked how many people think about the threats to undersea cables. My hand did not go up. Did that surprise you? It surprised me, but I was stunned when I discovered the spot of our research, the undersea cable networks. And one of the speakers today will be talking about this. And a few of us really in the policy world or in the political science world or in the social science world think about undersea cables. And most normal people out there probably don't worry about undersea cables. I don't intend to worry, but I do intend to point to those aspects of the internet and the cyber world that may not be new to that world, but are certainly new to the rest of us, the users. Yeah, I think it's important to remember this. Cyberspace, there is a physical infrastructure that supports it, of course. Now, I'd like to ask you a little bit about some of the new threats that are emerging in cyberspace. Maybe you can compare it a little bit to some of the more traditional, I guess, playing fields, if you will, of international relations and how cyberspace kind of differs. And what are some of those new threats you mentioned? It really gives a lot more power to individual actors. And in this case, in a lot of cases, they should say some non-state actors. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that is different from what we're used to dealing with from international relations and security perspective? Yeah, actually, it's very important because we live in a world of nation states. We've always lived in a world where your identity, my identity are tied to a nation state. I don't exist as an individual outside my citizenship. And we also lived in a world where only the state system counted. Now, we have a technology in which it enables just about every individual, every group, state, non-state, legal, non-legal, creative, non-creative to participate and actually behave, take decisions, do an action that may or may not be a good thing to do. So what we're faced with is that the state system countries are not able to really exert control over their citizens as much as they used to or they're now dealing with a set of adversaries, potential adversaries that are not other countries. I mean country versus country, we're all accustomed to that but we're not accustomed to country versus group or country versus some kind of adversary whose identity we do not know and we're certainly not accustomed to thinking about dealing with somebody who is not known, we call it the attribution problem, and who is not accountable for his or her or its action. So it's muddying, it's created ambiguities that we didn't have before and it's calling us to come up with tools, techniques, ways of understanding and managing those ambiguities. More than just the physical boundaries, there's so many other abstract concepts and we also heard this morning that the strong hand of the US government is not sustainable. That's something that if ultimately we're going to address this issue needs to change but it can't change overnight. The United States and the US government is in a kind of interesting, difficult position. It is the country that constructed, innovated, created, you name it, the internet. It wouldn't have been there before, it wouldn't have had cyberspace before. So it's the first mover, the prime mover, the first among what became many and now the rest of the international system is saying countries and other actors you're just one among many. You just come down to where we are or there's no special privilege or special position to be given to the United States. In some way this is a little unrealistic because without those initial vision, the initial funding and enormous amount of work by the private sector enterprise to begin with, we wouldn't be where we are now. But connecting the two questions, in the old days we used to worry about we still do maybe nuclear threats, nuclear power, nuclear adversaries, etc. But not everybody in the world, certainly not two billion people had nuclear weapons or had the capacity to get involved in disagreeable behavior. It was a handful of known actors. Now it's really quite different. And to your point that you made this morning, 44% of the internet users are in Asia and one could argue that the deck has been stacked in favor of some of the US companies like Google and others. Now whether or not that was because of ICON and the US government's role, I don't think it was largely, it was other factors of course competitive but the point that it's not sustainable is one that not a lot of people certainly in our world, which is the technology world, aren't thinking about, aren't talking about, the implications of that are quite significant. I would agree, I think it's, we were talking earlier Dave in our intro segment about why is it unsustainable. That's kind of been taken as a given in some of the keynotes this morning but let's talk about exactly why and some of the issues are around fragmentation that you mentioned earlier. Others are, you know, governance by its very nature, it has to be kind of a cooperative affair to some degree. You can't necessarily govern by fiat, at least you can't for long periods of time. So I'm curious, what are some of the ways to incent, do you think, Nasli, the US and what the government, US corporations and other members of the US cyberspace community for lack of a better term to actually give up some of this control and empower some of the rest of the world, excuse me, to take a lead in cyber governance? Well, I think the rest of the world is not going to take a lead. I think what we can, the way we should think about it is that the state system is not going to go away. Governments are here to stay, countries are here to stay, borders may change, you've got more countries, less countries, et cetera, but the institution of the state will not go away. And that in itself is part of, I guess, what the cyber community or the internet community wants to not to much modify, but wants to make sure that other stakeholders, business, private church groups, school, whatever, can have a say and participate in the management of that system. So far, the governance issues have been more organizational, more, I hate to use the analogy of driver's license, but providing driver's license, providing mechanisms for communication, routing, et cetera. But in the workshop today, we're dealing with other things, having to do with security and having to do with what models of security are to operate. And that is a raw nerve for the state system and very important for the private sector as well. Now, Nazli, we're up against the clock and I know you want to get back inside. I'll leave you with the last word. What do you hope the outcomes of this event will be today? And what's next for you? Oh, the outcome of today is going to give us, is to give us a vision, a map, a mapping of where we go from here in the real world at the point where ICANN is rethinking its orientation, and at the point in which the international community as a whole, state and non-state, formal and informal, is all attuned to the issues, become an issue that is of the management of the internet and the security of the internet. And so we're ending, this event today comes at the end of a phase in the world and we're putting in place the principles for the next steps as we move on. As to what I'm doing in the immediate future, completing the final reports for the Minerva program that supports the ECIR project and working with my colleagues at MIT and at Harvard to make that a good job. Great. Okay, we'll leave it there. Nazli Shukri, thanks very much for coming in the queue and thank you for having us here. Thank you. Appreciate it. Okay, keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly with Right Back After This Word.