 Thank you to everybody for coming. Welcome to our event today. We're all here for the Harlem Shake. Is that right? Oh, I hope not. We're actually here for a managing foreign policy in the information age. My name is Shanti Coletthal, and I'm editor of this volume, and we're very happy today to hear from our panel of distinguished authors and who'll be talking about their work. Before I introduce the panel, I just wanted to talk a little bit about how this all came about. It started with a conversation with the then director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown, Paula Neuberg, who was very interested in some of these themes, and I should note that there's many things are due to the Institute for supporting this project over the last two years. It certainly wouldn't have occurred without them. The themes in my discussions with Paula and with ISD, it became clear that there are a number of different conversations taking place at a number of different levels, across a number of different disciplines. Through it all, certain common themes were emerging. One was that we tended to understand the impact of the information age in terms of easily digestible nuggets. So for instance the Harlem Shake, right? Everybody or many people have heard about this now. We understand that it's a meme that spreads rapidly and instantaneously and really engulfs us without even having time to understand what it's all about. A similar, you know, similar trends are happening all throughout the worlds of diplomacy, development, and security. It may not be the Harlem Shake exactly, but certainly we've heard examples of tweets from ambassadors or embassies going viral and having actual impacts on foreign events, on certain practices like open government data that are rapidly taking hold in the development world. And yet, we're not really taking a step back to understand how these processes may all fit together, may have common themes that emerge, and how do we better understand these processes delinked from technology. So while many of these phenomena are being enabled by the ubiquitous flow of information that we now experience around the world, they're not necessarily technology dependent. And so the interest in this volume was to isolate some of these broader themes that have to do with development, diplomacy, and security in the information age, and yet not necessarily have them all rest on technology per se in that they don't actually have to be about tweeting ambassadors. They may be about how themes that emerge are relevant to foreign policy in general. So the two themes that we chose to focus on for this volume were increased transparency and increased volatility throughout international affairs. Across these different disciplines, those were the two themes that really stood out as being phenomena that practitioners and policy makers and scholars were having to grapple with without necessarily understanding some of the connective tissue between these different disciplines or understanding how it is that transparency and volatility are affecting international affairs. And so we decided to examine these two concepts and unpack them a little bit across these three different disciplines and represented on the panel today. We do have people speaking from each of these disciplines and indeed bridging some of them to talk about some of those themes and their relevance in foreign policy and international affairs today. One thing that I noticed in looking through all the papers is that many of them tended to stress certain common conclusions, particularly with respect to crafting policy in the information age. And very briefly what I found is that they all emphasize the themes of resilience, of credibility and adaptability. And that tended to be true whether it was diplomacy, development or security that we were talking about. And I think in the panel during the discussion some of our panelists will also be raising those themes and talking about their relevance. So with that I thought I would introduce the panel today. I'll start right here with Jerry Hyman, who's a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the president of the Hills Program on Governance since 2007. He was formerly the director of the US Agency for International Development's Global Office of Democracy and Governance. Jerry, for anybody who works in development, is a very well-known face and name and you probably know that he's responsible for developing much of USAID's democracy and governance programming over a number of years. And Jerry will be talking about the intersection between diplomacy and development and some of the themes that arise there. Next we have Joe Siegel, who is a scholar of the political economy of democratic transitions and their implications for development and stability. He is dual-headed at both the National Defense University and the University of Maryland. His work as a scholar, field practitioner and policy advisor focuses on the challenges of stabilizing fragile states, the economic threats to democratic transitions, and the means by which societies overcome autocratic legacies to create institutions of accountability. And in his paper for this volume, Joe is explored in particular the challenges facing fragile states. And so he'll be able to talk a little bit more about that today. We next have Jim Hurlong, who is a forward-thinking strategic intelligence and information technology leader and cyber strategy and security subject matter expert. Jim has worked on cyber issues throughout his career and has made notable contributions to homeland security and in the building of the Coast Guard cyber command. He is a graduate of the United States Coast Guard Academy and holds degrees in intelligence. And he'll be able to speak on cyber security, focusing on sort of the practitioners' perspective, I suppose, in dealing with some of these issues and in looking at security very broadly. And finally we'll have Lorelei Kelly, who's with the New America Foundation. She's a research fellow with the Open Technology Institute. She's piloting approaches to re-engineer how knowledge is shared with Congress, including the adoption of new technologies and innovations for local civic engagement. She formally directed the New Strategic Security Initiative, which educated Americans and elected leaders about security in an interconnected world. And she's published widely on these issues. If you've come to other New America events, you probably know this as well. She's long been a voice for trying to understand security from a different perspective. And Lorelei will be laying out some of the broad themes, particularly focusing on themes of resilience and grand strategy, as it has to do with security. And finally, we'll have as our discussant Tim Moorer, who is with the New America Foundation. He's actually sitting in the front here. We have such a large panel today. We could not have everybody sitting at the front. But Tim will be standing up at the end to comment on all of the papers and to draw some common themes between them. He focuses on internet policy here at the New America Foundation at the Open Technology Institutes. And he conducts research on internet governance, human rights policy, and cybersecurity. He's been published by Foreign Policy in a number of outlets and, you know, I think he brings a very fresh and engaged perspective. If you follow New America's blogs and other writings, he's always blogging about various aspects of these issues, whether it's digital diplomacy or cybersecurity. So I'm sure he'll have some fascinating and fresh insights. So with that, I think I'll wrap up and let the panel take it away. So, Jerry. Thanks to the Institute as well. So I've already learned two terms. One is tweeting ambassadors and the other is cyber diplomacy. So for me, this is already a win-win arrangement and it's only a couple minutes old. I thought I'd sort of lay the context. Most of my work's been in development, as Shanti said, but I thought I'd spend a better of time on the diplomacy side today just to show you that there's cross-sectoral work, as Shanti suggested earlier. So if you go back, really, thousands of years, diplomacy in China, Chinese emissaries all over in Europe. Before there were nation-states and so on. The traditional element of diplomacy was the sort of empowered ambassador or emissary. And these were sovereign-to-sovereign kinds of relationships. Normally quiet, normally behind the scenes. Normally each sovereign's emissary was there to protect the interests of his or her own, well, his mostly sovereign, and to project those interests to the other emissary. And so prior to the earliest cyber change, which is telegraphs, telephones, these emissaries were miles and days and months from their home capitals and therefore had a lot of discretion as to how they represented the interests and went with only general instructions. As communications became more prominent or became more available, the leash of these sovereign ambassadors became shorter and shorter. So you could get instructions from capital pretty quickly once you had a telegraph and instantaneously as communications developed. As a result, the leash, so to speak, of the emissaries became shorter and shorter. They got instructions about what they should say at the next meeting and what words they should use, what words they shouldn't use, who they should direct their talk to, and so on. And that changed really the notion of diplomacy from sovereign to sovereign through an intermediary to a much more direct relationship. Still, these relationships had to do, were mostly done behind closed doors and the objective was to reach an agreement, reach a sometimes written, sometimes not, as to how these two sovereign entities were to conduct their relations with one another. The new context, I would say, in the last maybe 50 years and even more recently than that is to have as engages a new set of actors and a new set of contexts of relationships. Clearly, states are only one kind of context and state relationships are now only one kind of context in which or between which diplomacy presumably and development as well presumably take place. So there are now a fracturing of these states in many cases to fragile, failing, fragmented conflict, all whatever kind of adjective you want to use, environments in which it's not clear who's having what relationships with whom and under what conditions. So the United States, let's say, or a donor in a country that has is conflict written is not only going to have relationships with the government which purports to speak for the entire country but is probably going to have to, is going to be called upon to have relationships with a variety of other non-state actors, some of which are benign, some of which are not, but which affect the larger relationship between the one entity and the other if the other even is an entity. So the state to state model has begun to wither a bit at the edges and particularly as attention has been drawn more and more to these failed and failing and fragmented and war-torn countries that are hard to categorize even categorize even as countries. So Syria, for example, is a little bit hard to figure out what you would do as a diplomatic or development matter if you were trying to do something about in Syria right now. And the number of these contexts of conflict written and fractured states it has grown substantially as you know over the last few years. Terrorism is another kind of element that shows no state boundary and whether you can have a relationship or whether you want to have a relationship with a terrorist organization and what that would look like is obviously problematic. Just this morning, President Karzai has accused the United States of having illicit from his perspective at least relationships with the Taliban. Taliban is not a state, not an entity, not a sovereign and whether he's right or whether he's wrong clearly there are some kinds of direct and indirect relationships that could grow up between a state and a non-state actor between non-state actors and one another. And as Shanti said in her introductory essay in this volume, kind of networks. So you have networks that don't recognize state boundaries or across state boundaries and obviously Al Qaeda is the most obvious example of that. So governments become only one kind of actor in the necessary relationships between actors across borders and within borders and the multiplicity of those kinds of actors, multiplicity of those kinds of environments has grown and made things a lot more complicated and the new age, the new media has made those relationships even more complicated because it now is possible to have a variety of relationships that are not face-to-face and that are beyond the abilities of governments even to deal with, let alone to control. So NGOs have now become a major feature in at least the foreign policy and diplomatic policy and certainly in the development policy of most of the donor countries and you saw that for example in the last three secretaries, secretary Albright, secretary Rice and secretary Clinton, all have made particular attempts at getting out of the cocoon of just talking internally to between them in meetings with the other government, have gone to universities, have gone to NGOs, have gone outside of the capital and so on to engage the larger population in the country. Still, until relatively recently, media was controlled pretty much by governments and in fact the first targets of most coups, if you go back 15 or 20 years and certainly longer than that, were to capture the national broadcasting system so that you could control the message around the country. Well, I don't know how many coups now even try to get the national broadcaster because you've now got such a broad expansion of the ways in which people can communicate with one another that that's only one of the many mechanisms of doing so. And so instead of having sovereign agreements and personal relationships between sovereign governments, we now have what David Ferris in this volume calls public agreements secretly arrived at and public diplomacy is perhaps now more central than ever and is part of the core mission of any foreign ministry to have a public diplomacy and not just state-to-state diplomacy. Well, okay, all of this is complicated by the new media, by the new technology, by state-controlled media no longer being a monopoly and so forth and so on. And that gets to the thing where in which the new media really complicates, it seems to me, a lot of things that might be useful and makes them more difficult. When WikiLeaks exposed the secret assessments left behind in secret cables, it was a case in which almost anybody can publish whatever they like, wherever they want, in any kind of environment. And it changes, it seems to me, the nature or it will change, the nature of diplomacy and development in ways that are hard, I think, to predict but not always beneficial. So for example, whereas before quote being diplomatic was a kind of adjective that you could apply to individuals as well, you keep secrets, you don't say things that are inopportune in public, you don't tell someone that they're fat or ugly, that's all diplomatic. You keep your personal views to yourself and you are forthright with care. The new transparency exposes absolutely everything and without favoritism and the result, for example, in a negotiation, consider just one context. Suppose you have a negotiation between states and everything becomes public. Well, you don't want everything to become public if you want a true negotiation. You want the negotiators to be able to probe one another's positions, to put out hypotheticals, to consider alternatives without necessarily having these things broadcast because if you did broadcast them, you would wind up with a lot of unfortunate commentary on what is not actually the position of your sovereign. The result of that is that we have indiscretions, gossip, et cetera, et cetera, which are often spoil a diplomatic initiative and make the exposure public or expose things before they are right for doing so. So if you can imagine, it would be impossible for Kissinger to open up to China in an environment like this, where he goes to Pakistan in the middle of the night, leaves on a plane, gets on the plane, goes to Beijing, comes back. Nobody knows he's even gone to China. Impossible in a world of WikiLeaks and Twitter's and Twittering ambassadors and other kinds of things like that. The question is not, therefore, I think it's no longer possible to live life without this. So the question is how can a state or how can two parties that are in diplomatic or development, they don't have time to go to the development side, relationships with one another, how do they conduct their relationships in a world in which there is no longer any expectation, reasonable expectation of privacy? So it's not just in the Sixth Amendment case. What does the public have in the United States? A reasonable expectation of being private. That is now in the international domain as well. And there is, it seems to me, very little area in which you can have a reasonable expectation of privacy to conduct sensitive discussions between entities, whether they be state entities or sub-state entities. Okay, great. Well, before I start, I want to thank also Shanti for her leadership of this project. It's been an honor to participate and thank you to the New American Foundation for hosting us today. As Shanti said, I was going to talk about the changing role of information communication technology, ICT, in fragile states. And particularly how this is changing the tension between volatility and transparency in these contexts. Now, most of us are familiar with the volatility that we see. A good example of this was, you know, last September when the amateur video was posted on YouTube called the Innocent of Muslims, very denigrating to Islam in general. This posting went viral in many Muslim countries. It led to protest riots and a number of deaths. And it led to, you know, various protests and some damage done to various US missions in these countries as well. Another dimension of the volatility and the heightened volatility we see is in the use of ICT by what we call spoilers. And these are, you know, leaders of militant groups, criminal organizations, various insurgencies that are conducting some sort of asymmetric warfare in, you know, marginalized areas of a fragile state and whose capacity really depends on their ability to attract local support. ICT has given them a huge lever in reaching far more people at low cost than they ever could have done before. And so it has empowered these spoilers and has really focused the, you know, put a premium on the importance of gaining trust and local support for, you know, the security challenges in fragile states. These spoilers play up whatever grievances there might be in marginalized areas. And, you know, this is often based on ethnic and social divisions within a society. And they are really trying to command an alternative narrative to the one promoted by the government, although it's a negative narrative. It's a reason why people should join their insurgency or armed revolt. And so this is contributing to greater volatility in many fragile states. Now, on the transparency side, you know, despite these vulnerabilities to greater vulnerability, we're seeing, you know, that ICT is also contributing to greater levels of stability. And, you know, it's important to keep in mind that this is emerging out of a context where fragile states have often been characterized by high levels of restricted information. They've been closed societies. And so regimes that have been in power in these places have been able to command the narrative. And they've been able to, you know, conduct human rights abuses or engage in corruption really under the radar, without people knowing or without much public pressure for doing so. And because of the challenges of collective action where it's a lot harder to organize the majority who may be disadvantaged by a particular policy, they've been able to, you know, perpetuate that over time. They've enjoyed an asymmetry of information control which contributed to the lower levels of development performance and higher levels of insecurity. Now, with the emergence of ICT in many fragile states, you know, in Africa today 50% of all adults have access to a cell phone. You know, with this expansion of access to information, you're seeing a breakdown in this asymmetry of information. This is having direct effects on governance, development and security. In many of these contexts. Let me just run through a couple of the avenues by which information is contributing to greater stability. First, I would highlight the heightened legitimacy we're seeing, you know, with more information. There's a more vibrant marketplace of ideas, you know, population is becoming more educated and aware of the various opinions that are out there and this is leading to a more informed policy, dialogue and decision-making process. It also contributes directly to better elections and so with more access to information, the quality of debate in elections is elevated. The recent Kenya election which got a lot of coverage as an example of this while controversial in other ways, they had more debate than they've ever had in Kenya. They had a number of televised debate that were tweeted. The election process itself was something you could monitor online. You could actually track the election results by district and off your cell phone or off the computer and so it contributed a much greater degree of transparency to the process and therefore legitimacy to the outcome, even though it was highly contested and it's still controversial for other reasons. You know, the result was 50.3% for the declared winner and people, I think at least recognize that the process was more transparent than when it's been in the past. And, you know, this in turn is reducing a key driver of instability in many fragile states. Indeed, a lot of the conflict literature has shown that illegitimacy is one of the key reasons that foment grievances that lead to greater levels of conflict. And autocratic states have much higher propensities for conflict than what we see in more open societies. You know, a second driver of stability that we're seeing with ICT is the transparency issue with regards to corruption. More information makes it harder to misuse data, misuse state resources and therefore contribute to more insecurity and lack of development investments on the part of government. It also, you know, greater access to information is also facilitating greater organizational capacity among the majority. And as a result, they can more actively represent their interest. It's breaking down some of the collective action challenges. And so we're having higher levels of accountability in these societies. Third vehicle that I would highlight is that it's fostering more responsiveness in the part of government. When there's more information, there's more pressure for the government to act when there are crises in a society. For some time, it's been recognized that democracies are more responsive when there is a looming famine or other crisis in a society. It's because they feel pressure, the information is on the front pages of the papers or in media. And the same is happening on the ICT level, that no longer are governments able to close off that information, that dialogue. And they're under greater pressure, both nationally and internationally, to act when there is a crisis of some type or another. And so the upshot is that we have, you know, parallel processes where there's greater short-term volatility, but long-term, institutionally, there's greater stability in fragile states because of the greater access to information. And I think I'd highlight two policy implications from that. One is that, you know, governments need to be more deliberate and effective in reaching out to populations than they have in the past. Jerry talked about public diplomacy for the international community, but there's a need to engage in public diplomacy within your own societies to a much greater extent. Because of this notion that there's a competition for trust and a competition for the narrative within many fragile states and their communities, the governments need to do a much better job of connecting with and communicating with communities to gain that trust. And they need to do that by working with civil society groups and with media who often have far higher levels of trust within these communities than does the government. The second policy implication I would highlight is that we need to recognize that ICT is part of a broader governance process. And for ICT to be effectively used from an accountability standpoint, it requires independent actors. It requires civil society. It requires media. It requires bloggers. These are the folks who gather information, disseminate it, analyze it. It doesn't happen on its own. And for these actors to be effective, they need to be protected. Unfortunately, in many fragile state settings, the instinct is to intimidate these actors. And if we're going to see some of the stabilizing benefits of ICT, greater attention needs to be spent on protecting them. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'd like to also start by thanking Shanti and the New America Foundation. As she said, it's an opportunity for a practitioner to take part in this particular forum, which is a great opportunity for me and I think I can speak for my co-author who's not here as well. And that's kind of the, just, you know, if you read the paper, and I hope you do in the book, and the talk today will be kind of from that perspective. As a military and an intelligence professional, we're always kind of looking, you know, how do you get advantage over your adversary? And that's kind of the part of the approach we took. And yes, the Coast Guard is part of the military. I just want to clear that bad joke. No, okay. And so, you know, looking at it, as in the military and intelligence, you're always bombarded with things such as information dominance and decision superiority. And when we kind of looked at that, we thought, you know, information dominance is a great concept, but there's something missing. And as an IT guy, you know, I'm very familiar with Nicholas Carr talking about, you know, IT doesn't matter, you know. So, you know, we take a look at it as information itself does not give you competitive advantage. The infrastructure doesn't give you kind of a competitive advantage. So what would? And so what we kind of came up with is what's going to give you competitive advantage is to be able to outthink your adversary. And so I'm going to, and we looked at that in terms of strategy, and we're going to look at that. And I'm going to dive deeper into looking at the strategy of our nearest competitor, China. But the model, so we're military guys, so we needed some kind of model or something to attack. And what we came up with, and you read in the paper, it's called cognitive dominance. So one, it's kind of got a catchy title. But we needed some kind of framework to assess the strategy of our competitor. Hopefully, you know, assess it against our own and learn from that. Cognitive dominance differs from kind of information dominance in that it makes people and expertise really the center of things. It's, you know, the expertise, we all have things that we can kind of pull out of our head. We can put in a database and we can share. And obviously with the infrastructure we have today and the electromagnetic, electromagnetic domain, we can connect. But there are things that you just know with, you know, just by seeing it. So it's really necessary to have connection to the people and not just the technology. There are plenty of details in the, you know, in terms of the time and what I want to focus on. There's plenty of details about cognitive dominance in the paper, but we came up with basic five principles. One, cognitive depth, and that's really the people and the expertise. So we have to actually develop all of these people that we want to connect and have connected at all times to provide that expertise so we can get some kind of decision superiority or outthink or adversary. Cognitive strength, and that's the ability to actually take those people and that information and make better decisions faster than the folks that we're working against. Cognitive agility, and that's to bring the right information and the right expertise quicker. And that's really the infrastructure piece. We can't, you know, I said IT doesn't matter, but it does. You have to have it, and everyone else kind of does. Cognitive defense, and this is probably where you're looking at your traditional cybersecurity. So we don't want to be disrupted while we're trying to conduct our operations or put the right people in touch with the right information. And then cognitive resilience, so you have to be able to recover. I think it's a given that, you know, if you operate in cyberspace or the electromagnetic domain, you use networks, at some point you will be compromised. You probably are, and just don't know it, but you have to be able to recover from that and get back so you can again make decisions better and faster than your adversary. So we wanted to look at a country, I said China, that we thought was kind of, as we say, half lurching, half running towards this kind of cognitive dominance. Lucky, I guess, is that, you know, there hasn't been any reporting in the last few months on China and cyberspace. Okay, another really bad joke, right? So there's lots of things out there, right? You know, so I'm not picking on China. As a matter of fact, we're going to use it as a case study. But there's, in taking a look at their strategy and first, you know, I'll go into some examples of, I think, what they're doing to actually achieve cognitive dominance and operate effectively, and some may say superior, a little more superior than we are in cyberspace. My bosses are not going to be happy with that. But you've got to look at their strategic foundation. So in one, China, and if you read their strategy documents, they view the electromagnetic spectrum as a warfighting domain. So you can say we do the same here, here in the U.S. Another important thing, and we all like to keep our state secrets and our strategies, you know, so it's hard to find exactly what truly our other states are thinking and how they want to operate. But to find folks at the Foreign Military Studies Office, that's the Army, the Naval War College, reviewing their kind of open source information, you know, they've come to say that, you know, China views that military, their advantage for national power comes in economic and military advantage, and that they need to also be very skilled in information warfare. So this idea of operating effectively in the electromagnetic domain is very important to them. In fact, if you look at their defense white papers that come out, 2007, 2008, it emphasizes the ability to operate in a highly complex and electromagnetic environment. So this is very important. And they've come up with a concept called integrated network electronic warfare, and that's where we're saying they're kind of achieving or executing this cognitive dominance within that framework. And what that is, it's a seamless integration of electronic warfare and computer network warfare. The computer network warfare is the piece that attacks the layers where you're looking at the processing. So that's where the human interaction comes. And there you have the ability to, you know, change information, prevent information from being received, try to affect that decision making. The electronic warfare piece attacks kind of the signals and certain devices. So I can stop you from connecting that expertise to that particular decision maker, or I can reduce that capability. And it's, I think it's pretty important because I think if you look at some, you know, kind of our strategy, but how we're organized in the U.S., we still have, we haven't quite put those two together. We still operate in what I heard one general call cylinders of excellence. So, you know, so executing cognitive dominance, we kind of took a look based on the five principles and see what exactly was China doing to give us the impression that yes, they're effectively executing the strategy. So in cognitive depth, huge investment in skilled and educated population. Sure, the numbers are different, but quite frankly they graduate a lot more engineering, IT science related folks than we do. If you read some of the, again, some of their open source reporting, they train their leadership at all echelons to be very in tune with information warfare and have established several information warfare universities. So they're pulling that strength out. Cognitive strength, truly expert hackers. You can read the open source reporting on that. The big piece here is there's cyber reconnaissance and espionage. And these are two very important tools that allow them to kind of carry out their operations. And it's probably where we've seen probably the most reporting in the news, right? NASA, clear defense contractors, Coca-Cola, Google, New York Times. The range of information that's stolen is interesting because it's not just military. It's not just taking military secrets to give you advantage and say a shooting war. It's stealing intellectual property so that I can reduce research and development times and gain an economic advantage. It's getting positions ahead of negotiations, as we've heard a little earlier. It's potentially stopping information that might be embarrassing to the government or senior officials. So there's a lot of objectives they're achieving with these particular tools. Cognitive agility, so massive investment in infrastructure. You have that many people that are that connected and lots of digital natives. You need to actually have an infrastructure for them to get connected. The one thing, and I see the note, but Mandion, so there's a report out now, Advanced Persistent Threat, and I encourage you to read it. They tracked a lot and they kind of sum it up with a couple of good pieces that current intact infrastructure includes 1,000 servers. That's resilience and agility. And this is probably the best one I like because it really takes the people is that given the volume duration type of attack activity, we need to be directly supported by linguists, open source researchers, malware authors, industry experts, and translate the task requests from requesters to operators. They get the people piece. This is kind of a people problem. So, you know, and kind of I'll get to it. We could debate the execution, you know, the intent of why they're doing it that was not necessarily the intent of what this paper was about. We wanted to explore and emphasize, you know, whether China thinks of their strategy and we didn't really care if they thought it was or it wasn't. What matters is that China's actions demonstrate an understanding of the modern information environment, and that they use the principles of cognitive dominance to be able to outthink their adversaries. It's not to say that it's not security implications for the U.S. and China's actions certainly are. Stolen intellectual property has hit us to say the least. We all hear about cyber Pearl Harbors, and we hear about Cyber 9-Elevens, which I'm not quite sure are yet, about turning out the lights. But again, the discussion and the intent and the implications wasn't what we were trying to do. We wanted to highlight a near competitor who has a clear understanding of the modern information age and hope that we could actually learn from them. Thank you. Thanks very much. I am actually not going to talk about what I wrote very much because I have a colleague here, Tim, who's going to go into the details of cybersecurity. Instead, I'm going to focus on what we like to call grand strategy, and I'm also going to practice bridging the gap between sort of institutional jargon that we like to talk about in national security and maybe the broader audience, certainly the younger cohort that I hope is paying attention to this whole conversation. So first, I'd like to point out that at Open Technology Institute we're really, one of our big motivations is building the digital global town square. And we believe that connectivity and connectedness is a universal human right, and it's got to extend to the internet and include access to Open Technology and platforms, ultimately to include all people and improve their prospects of self-determination and the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. How do we get there? This is the grand strategy, is how do we get there in a world of transparency and volatility, and hopefully I'll only use those words twice in my talk. So what is grand strategy? Grand strategy, I like to say it's the big picture, it's the eyes on the prize. In a movie, it's the plot line that propels the story forward and hopefully takes us to the happy ending. So what does grand strategy look like in national security? Well, I'll give you an example from the past. The world used to be, and this is before 1991, that's sort of when I started getting interested in national security. I lived in Berlin in 1989, so you can imagine it was an exciting year. The world used to be easily measured, it used to be easily framed as sort of linear and with scalable solutions, rational and predictable. This policy, this top line was called containment, and it relied on continual mutual military preparedness and the threat of war between the Soviets and the United States to maintain the peace. The acronym that described this posture in the world was Mutual Assured Destruction, M-A-D, people probably remember that. It went like this, basically, strike first, die second. In contrast, today's world appears much more chaotic, often random, unpredictable. The solutions also have to include humans. So how we define modern security is at play right now with this connectivity, this volatility, this transparency being key themes. So how do we create a new framework? Could we call it something like Mutual Assured Connection to flip us 180 degrees? I'll put it simply again. We spent the last century perfecting how we were all going to die together. We need to spend this century figuring out how we're all going to live together. That's basically the thesis for the grand strategy for the next 100 years. So issues of war and peace is where this stuff is really, really important. I worked in Congress from the late 90s up till 2006. I really saw the failure of this throughout that 10 years. You can imagine we both had Afghanistan and Iraq, and we had lots and lots of global engagement, interventions throughout the 90s that we haven't fully understood, and a lot of those lessons are not yet reflected in our policies nor our national security strategies. So these issues of war and peace are often the most important responsibilities of citizens and their elected leaders, yet our over-reliance to this day on coercion and control centralization shows really how much our leadership continues to execute a strategy that stuck firmly in the past. And our institutions today are often incapable of addressing the sort of distributed and humid-centered threats that we face today. And so if we define connectivity as a security principle, in today's world I'll just say three things we need to pay attention to is that our security must address the safety of people across and within our own borders. We can't achieve security alone anymore, and we need a new combination of policies and resources to be secure. So across the globe, this has been tremendous in the last two years, a profound shift is underway. Demands for inclusion are redistributing power from hierarchies to individuals and communities. These changes will ultimately be a blend of top-down and bottom-up strategies and directives. And attaining this goal is going to require a kind of global network of individuals and groups who see themselves as stakeholders in power sharing and also legitimate voices in determining a shared future. This space between institutions and individuals is often called civil society, so I'd like to put forward what we need as a strategy, a security strategy for civil society. What this is going to require of us is to support these individuals who are taking these stands. Social media is actually doing a lot of this already. We've seen it certainly in Egypt. It's something that wasn't evident in Berlin in 1989 that's accelerating these voices. We have to build bridges between the traditional and the new. That's the institutions and the activists in order to navigate the changing power dynamic. So we have to create new spaces to connect elected leaders who are risk takers with their audience of support. And we have to persuade people in office and in power by providing them this political space and support who want to be change agents. We really need to support our change agents, recognize them and support them. So the other thing I'd like to point out is how we can change the currency of power and what I like to call how do we move into the social capital world where relationships are going to be the primary currency to solve these collective problems for all of our mutual benefit. The highest caliber kind of social capital that an individual or a nation could have for that matter is based on prior collaboration and trust. So figuring out new ways to leverage transparency and to connect and share ideas, one of the ways we can do this is how do we start moving away from the worst case scenario world where we're so ready to pounce and use the military to a situation where we can use transparency and connectivity to give the benefit of the doubt a little bit longer to get better information to rely on distributed expertise. And why is this important? While we're moving in the right direction right now we have ideas like a whole of government experiences from Somalia to Haiti to New Orleans is another example of resilience in society to Iraq and Afghanistan. When I worked on the Hill the most interesting thing in all of the testimonies that I went to almost 90% of them you had an officer saying these problems have no military solution. These problems have no military solution. They're about social resilience. They're about politics and relationships and society and power distribution. Our government responded with whole of government strategies for engagement and exit but what we need is more like a strategy of commitment and what we need is to embrace whole of society concepts. So excuse me have to sorry I'm having to use notes but I'm trying to bungee jump between ideas here. So what the internet revolution has created is a world of peers and a sense of entitlement that goes along with that. The people around the world expect for themselves what we expect for ourselves today which is possibly this is the greatest promise of democracy which is self-determination basically it's the difference between fate and destiny you choose one and the other chooses you. People want a destiny they want the interactive option and we Americans have been preaching this for years and now the moment is before us how are we going to act on this expectation. So let me put it bluntly again in a world of peers I'm going to kill you is not an effective security strategy and it's certainly not persuading the right people. Some of the most idealistic individuals I know are either in uniform or in technology and I think these two worlds have a lot to learn from each other right now. Ask anyone who served in a mission abroad during the 90s up into Iraq and Afghanistan ask what was the most important experience you had what are you most proud of. I guarantee most of the time it's going to be about building things not breaking things it won't be so much about the use of force it will be about how they help create some kind of positive social change they know better than anyone that a resilient society and a shared future isn't an accident but an outcome they've done the best they can with the tools they've had but our military cannot be responsible for most of these tasks so I guarantee you that if we continue this overreliance on the military for carrying out so many of the tasks in the modern world of representing us we will overreact and so this is again why we need this security strategy for civil society. We need to move from coercion and towards confidence building away from exclusion toward participation away from borders and toward networks away from security and towards transparency we need to get really good at democracy and I'll just close and go into the rest of it for Q&A. The other day I was tweeting at an event and I was tweeting about the need to improve and evolve our democracy and at the end the relationships are going to leverage technology not the other way around and I got a tweet back that said haven't you read Lord of the Flies this can never happen how many people here have read Lord of the Flies pretty sure pretty much everybody it's a really other it's a very important metaphor I think for today the synopsis there is a bunch of shipwreck boys on an island with very different character traits descend into brutal superstition and a Darwinian existence so what if Simon had had an encrypted smart phone what if Piggy had commotion which is a peer to peer mesh broadband network that travels through phones and not signal towers there's no kill switch for dictators what if Ralph had been able to nudge the crowd towards civilized behavior could it could they have defeated Jack and his henchmen before early on for the rest of us though I think the question is what if the outside world had noticed their plight on that island at the signal fire and not waited until the island was burning down before they responded so right now we have this great momentum and potential but we're also experiencing a failure of imagination at many levels in the face of this opportunity the best question I can come up with as far as disruptive technology is concerned is it going to be drones or is it going to be phones or are we going to choose social capital or coercion and force and I look forward to in joining this conversation with the panel and listening to what Tim has to say about actually what I wrote about which was the cybersecurity section thanks Laura thanks to all of you for coming and it's a pleasure to join so many distinguished panelists I have now the challenge of trying to connect all of what the four have said with the theme of today's talk and I'd like to do that by first taking a step back and to look at what is actually new about what we are talking about second talk about transparency and volatility the two themes that combine the talks that we've heard today and then three offer a way to think about the challenge that the three areas diplomacy development and security all face together and what the common theme among them is so first of all I'd like to start by highlighting that a lot of what we are trying to figure out has already a precedent how many of you remember watching on November 9th 1989 people going to Brandenburg gate on TV great so some of you might remember that the reason why people started going to Brandenburg gate that night was because an East German government official had made an announcement on East German television announcing a lift on a travel program that had been in place for a long time and that would constitute a significant change in German policy and you had TV broadcasting this two people in East Berlin and you had West German television broadcasting two people in East Berlin how people were going to Brandenburg gate that night so the reason why more and more people kept going there was because they were able to watch that some of their neighbors and friends were all of a sudden going to the wall and eventually resulted in the fall of the wall so the TV played a key role in 1989 fast forward to 2010 a lot more of us probably watched or not watched but are aware of the man that set himself in fire in Tunisia triggering the Arab revolutions that was not because of a centralized TV station broadcasting that there was because of YouTube and the social media that we already heard about earlier today second example how many of you still remember or watched or read the news about the Panagon Papers Daniel Ellsberg okay that's fewer people Daniel Ellsberg when he leaked the Panagon Papers to the New York Times considered going to the Harvard Crimson a newspaper at Harvard University as an alternative if the New York Times would turn down his request to publish the data when Bradley Manning decided to leak his information he didn't go to a student paper but to WikiLeaks here you have the analogy also to centralized kind of institution a major media company but he decided to go to a social media outlet to leak his material so in both cases we see a trend that signifies a loss of centralized control and if you've seen the latest book by Moises Naim over at the Carnegie Endowment that was released last week he wrote an entire book about the end of power Joseph Nye at the Harvard Kennedy School does not call it the end of power but he speaks of the transition and the diffusion of power the latter being the more important one when we talk about cyberspace in that we see a relative diffusion of power from state to non-state actors not necessarily undermining the central role of states but we see the increase in the rise of non-state actors that we heard about in terms of the NGOs in terms of the hacktivists and hackers that we heard about that Jim talked about and Lorelai's call for a grand strategy for a global society so with that tying that to the transparency and volatility themes that we heard about earlier in terms of transparency I think in terms of next step or research it'll be very interesting to see how we don't just see an absolute rise in the amount of transparency when it comes to government documents but actually the relative distribution of that transparency if you think of WikiLeaks WikiLeaks exposed documents of the US government not the Russian government so it was a very selective leaking of information it also leaked only information at the secret level not the top secret level so from an academic perspective there are a lot of biases in terms of that information being leaked and the impact it had so the way that transparency is being used and the way that information is being disclosed the way it's distributed also has a power it's political power and who holds the power to actually release those data WikiLeaks in a sense replaced government as the guardian of secrets so whereas the government and he made the argument that he prefers the government to be the hold of secrets rather than a group like WikiLeaks because at least democratic governments can be held accountable by their citizens whereas WikiLeaks is a small group of individuals where the public at large has very little influence to actually determine what they're going to do with the information that they acquired and how they're being leaked that leads me to the second piece and this by the way is what Gelt and his paper wrote about in terms of the dark arts that governments will also see their intelligence activities etc exposed so it's really a political tool that leads me to the second theme volatility and the key factor of speed and the shortening of the leash as we heard earlier in terms of emissaries and the reduction of autonomy by diplomats in that it becomes not only a lot more it comes easier for capitalists to instruct them what to do but they also have to react to reactive events my focus has been on cyber security Jim already talked a lot about cyber exfiltration and cyber espionage the additional piece of that is obviously the Stuxnet virus and when we heard in 2010 and read last year in the New York Times that you've had for the first time is spilled over from the virtual world into the physical world with a skater system being attacked through malware online and that you're not able to do warfare not just in the virtual space but also in the physical space presents a new quality in the type of activity you can do online militarily this leads me to the third piece how can we think about this or one way to think about this is Bill Lynn as many of you will know wrote an article in 2010 for foreign affairs defending a new domain calling cyberspace the fifth domain that the United Nations has to defend in addition to land, air, sea and space he spoke of cyberspace as a new domain in the military context I would suggest that this is actually what combines development, diplomacy and security that all of us are now experiencing cyberspace opening up a new domain for human interaction and a lot of the things that we've seen in these areas now being transposed into this new domain that we're struggling with how do we actually adapt to that you might have seen a foreign policy piece called a new Westphalian system that talked about the internet and this talks about this how many political scientists are in the room just quick show of hands please okay, so a quick outline of what the Westphalian system is in 1648 you had a piece, actually two peace treaties which have come to be known as the piece of Westphalia that consolidated war that ravaged in Europe and that basically said your religion depends on the territory you lived in it brought to an end a century-long struggle between the secular and the religious forces when after the Roman Empire collapsed you basically had the secular, the government retreat and you had the church step in as a parallel structure structuring a lot of the political and social activity in Europe then you had the reformation, the church split and that led to the wars in terms of who's Protestant, who's Catholic and who united with the peace of Westphalia in 1648 that led to the foundation for the rise of the nation state and the rise of the secular force of the nation state as the predominant political order and actor in international system and religion, at least in Europe has been on a retreat since in many ways and this is what the FPP is also about we see a resurrection of those parallel structures today if you think of Facebook Rebecca McKinnon who wrote a book that was published last year and talks about Facebookistan and the fact that you have companies whose users are a lot of times broader than have more people together than individual countries have in terms of population so you could think this is a bit of a stretch but analogy would be that Facebook and Google Plus and Twitter that their communities are in many ways similar to the kind of religious communities we saw in Europe before the peace of Westphalia and the global governing structures and what we in terms of what we talked about earlier how do we structure this and how do we approach this from the development diplomacy and security angle comes down to how do we manage this transition where the division and distinction between foreign and domestic spaces that have structured our international relations for the last centuries continue to disappear because of cyberspace and you have the developing world increasingly being connected hopefully leading to more stability as Joe pointed out when it comes to fragile states but a lot of times I think it will also come down to how is that transparency and additional information actually being distributed across in specific circumstances and with that I will end by saying I think what this panel also highlighted is a key challenge for us is to figure out how are we actually trying to think about this and how is it, is this going to be in communication study, is this a political science field is this legal studies military studies right now we see different disciplines all trying to think about the same problem reinventing the wheel in certain aspects and I don't think we've really figured out yet how do we actually think about this multi-disciplinary problem and hopefully that will be maybe another went here at the New America Foundation all right well we've had incredibly interesting presentations and we can get to our Q&A now and I apologize I may have to drink from this bottle of water I seem to be having a Marco Rubio moment so please anybody yes and please identify yourself thank you thank you Robert Truett a president of International Investor we've been an observer of this activity for a long time in fairness I have a question for each of you but that wouldn't be fair to the rest of the audience so I'm going to try to bring it down to a single question and I would start with Ms. Kelly if you would because I think you were the one who seemed to portray the most optimistic scenario or at least hope the prospects that more transparency freer information could bring us but my question goes to the heart of that because in this era here in the United States for example where we've had this explosion of information of new media, of new technologies disseminating all this information we've also seen an era where we've seen more income and wealth inequality than ever before we've seen an era where at least one war has begun with at least questionable justification we've been in an era where we've seen a rise of intelligence industry and communities like never before indeed the rise of government control of information like never before so there seems to be a contradiction between what has happened in terms of all this new information and yet a lot of cause for worry about where it's heading us I'll just say that, I agree with you we're at a huge moment of change and yours is really going to determine the future certainly and I don't mean to be so US focused here, I'd like us to get to the point where these conversations the United States is a huge social capital innovator in the world and it's important for us to start seeing ourselves in the scheme of things than as the scheme of things I think one of the reasons I'm optimistic is because I left the field of national security and moved into open technology and there's a lot more happy endings in open technology that there was in national security and I think that can change but what delights me is sitting here next to Mr. Holong and hearing him say how cognitive resilience is a security strategy for the United States that means investment in public education you have the military itself now talking about social resilience our ability to rebound to navigate change, to prosper together as the success of our nation I think what's happened though the civilians haven't yet taken up this conversation in a compelling way and reframed our priorities as a country going forward and this is only going to happen if we build these bridges between these old traditional conventional stodgy institutions and the young people and the energy and ideas and the way they see the world is linked and not ranked and the way the world is simultaneous and not sequential and this is their intellectual endowment I still have to think really hard I still went to college during the Cold War and these folks don't but we have to create the pathways for them and I noticed this because I went to a lot of the Occupy meetings to see what was being talked about and the problem there was they never created institutionally recognizable steps forward they didn't have to be acceptable steps forward they needed to be recognizable and that was I think what we're going to see next I think that they that movement for change and this despair of the income distribution in this country and the sense that we're going to spiral downward is palpable it hasn't gone away it's reorganizing and my hope is that we can build the bridges so that it reorganizes in an optimally productive way that has to happen in this town by the way this is what Washington DC can offer the country is being a connective bridge and we're living in the last days of Rome here and in the last days of Rome I'm sure there were a lot of great restaurants but there were also a lot of bad ideas and we have to change that and that's the role for us now is to be the hub for bringing the outside in does that make sense it does but it doesn't refute the idea of my notion that in many aspects we're worse off than we were 20 years ago let's go to it that's a valid point I think often in these discussions you tend to sort of get locked into this well I'm optimistic, no I'm pessimistic pessimistic sort of battle and some people have actually written now about let's try and get rid of these pessimist optimist labels and try and just sort of we may have our standpoints but let's try and actually see objectively dissect what are the positive aspects and the negative aspects and maybe they don't cancel each other out Mike, in the back Mike Nelson I write for Bloomberg Government on Technology Policy and in my spare time I'm a professor of internet studies at Georgetown like Laurel I am a member of the Cyber Optimist Club but I really just care about making things better step by step I want to look at the very bottom level here we've talked a lot about the geopolitics and the big trends I want to focus on the people out in the field who are actually trying to use the technology tomorrow night the internet society here in DC is having a discussion with six internet heroes these are internet freedom fellows who are sponsored by the State Department they're helping opening up channels of communication in China in Azerbaijan Venezuela the problem is they're getting support from the U.S. State Department and that in some cases almost undermines our effort to support these people because they get painted as Stooges of America I'm wondering if anybody here has ideas on how to get other countries to do more to support these very courageous people to use encryption and wireless technologies and social media to spread truth to promote freedom of speech online and I'm also interested in knowing whether the corporate sector could or should be doing anything here do you have any examples of people outside of the U.S. government who have come up with ingenious ways to help the freedom fighters in cyberspace anybody want to go first so I think one example is actually the KS Computer Club in Germany which has been around for at least two or if not three decades and I grew up in Germany so I was actually just in Berlin for four weeks in December and January and I think there's also a very healthy discussion among technologists to the degree to which they want to be affiliated with a government or the U.S. government in general when it comes to supporting human rights in terms of what we heard earlier the question of legitimacy and the credibility that they have and when I was in Germany in January one of the major newspapers actually ran a report on one hacktivist that actively supported Syrian human rights activists on the ground just by one man's show because he had the technical skills to assist them and he actually had to quit I believe he was depressed and couldn't handle the ethical challenge that he was facing as part of doing that so I think when it comes to Germany there's definitely a very active community I think there were 6,000 participants at the congress in December and I know that in a few other countries you have similar nests in communities Is anybody else on the panel? So I'll depart for a moment the pessimism of my talk to your more optimistic side notwithstanding Shanti's suggestion that we bridge these gaps if you ask about the corporations seems to me Google and for example has done has done quite a bit they're trying to negotiate for example a protocol within China that will protect the people who are on the space from state retribution and yet be able to operate there and that is clearly going to be a problem in autocratic states and it was a Google executive not necessarily on behalf of Google who was for 59 nanoseconds I think quite a leading position in the Egyptian recent Egyptian changes a couple of years ago first of all the technology itself is what's empowering people to do things that's both the promise and the problem of the open technology anybody can get on there and do almost anything and it's very difficult for states to deal with that whether in for benign reasons or malignant reasons and those two come together it's very hard to gain any kind of control if you want to put it that way of how these systems are going to be used and that it seems to me is in a way that's what your heroes are after they want to be able to get on into cyberspace and take their message out unfortunately as we've seen in technologies all the way throughout probably a whole series of world change technologies are neutral with respect to how they're used and so they can be used for good purposes and for less good purposes but it seems to me that one of the things that the corporations are contributing is precisely the technology to make these things more open and transparent than they once were as the state department we have a couple of other mechanisms I don't know how you know the national for democracy for example I think thinks of itself in a neutral term people aren't going to confuse it with the department of state and so on I'm not so sure that's true when you go abroad because their money comes from congress and is part of the budget so I think the NED congratulates itself possibly more than it ought to about the neutrality of its actions around the world and if you were to find users or servers of NED projects I don't know if they would and that's not a rhetorical question I just don't know how they're viewed there is an attempt one last point in that there was an attempt feebly still gasping for error called the community of democracies which was an attempt to get the democracies of the world not just the western donor democracies but the other democracies as well to join hands in some of the democracies around the world including free media and obviously including cyber areas it's struggling I would say and if you asked yourself how much is it accomplished it might not be as much as it as its founders had hope for I might just say that I consider a hero Aaron Swartz an example I just went to Freedom to Connect which is another wonderful convening that happened last week and you know it's a tragic ending and really unfortunate in so many ways but what he did with his young life was grab hold of this idea of the redistribution of power and opportunity to make the world a better place and I really feel like it's incumbent on all of us who really look and think about what he did and what he stood for and again move it forward into these institutions which are going to be so rigid and inflexible and they're going to have to be persuaded and walked into this modern era and I really feel like the people in this room who look like everyone's around my cohort are the ones that really need to start doing more of that mentoring creating the bridges and making this change recognizable and not so threatening to the institutions that we have in the United States it really has to happen here if we blow it it's bad for everybody not to be ethnocentric but you know the rest of the world pays a lot more attention to us than we pay to the rest of the world and that's probably not going to change maybe in the effort to make it less ethnocentric I could throughout you know a notion that what we're really talking about is all those changing norms about what and how we see intimidation violence towards bloggers and civil society groups and journalists who are trying to disseminate the information and gain access to information I think it's a long-term process but you know there is growing recognition awareness that's out there I think one of the proposals I've made is that we need to be moving towards a situation where we elevate the the criminalization of the intimidation towards these individuals that it's not an ordinary crime when you attack or harass or imprison a blogger or a journalist because these are the eyes and ears of the whole world really and the effects of being silenced is much greater from a governance security and development perspective and so you know there are regional charters in Africa and Latin America and Europe where there are legal mechanisms where this idea can be pushed forward and there are courts that can be called upon when the national court systems are not responding to these abuses and there is even a push to make the killing or intimidation of a journalist or blogger a crime against humanity is part of the ICC the International Criminal Court Diane Perlman George Mason School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution thanks that was a great panel so anyway Lorela you mentioned that you talked a lot about coercion and bad ideas and we seem to be organized around coercion, threat, punishment, isolation sanctions it's kind of simplistic, immature concrete, black and white world view of good guys and going after bad guys so my question is as far as and a lot of our policies and I guess the ones I'm most interested in are sanctions and deterrents are flawed and have the opposite effect and some decent well meaning people totally believe in them as well as some not so decent well meaning who may know that they may not work so specifically with Iran and North Korea there's a belief that because they're hurting it means they're working and the fact that they're hurting does not mean that they're working it's making it harder for moderates increasing popularity of hardliners hurting innocent people et cetera so I'm just wondering in addition to just issues of transparency in terms of education I think some people can be educated and more psychologically attuned to the effect of these policies on those on the receiving end so could you relate this to that designing policy that could work one of the reasons I decided to focus on congress is because one of our reactions to this as a society to this sort of distributed threat is not to create a distributed solution which is to bring in more voices it's been to consolidate more power to the executive branch I just see no good ending coming of this and so one of the things that could happen and I commend George Mason because it is such a practitioner oriented school especially your program is the next wall that has to come down is the walls of the ivory tower where are our experts I remember being when I worked in congress the people who had the best knowledge and the highest social capital meaning their ideas were based on greater goods and they were not about financial conflicts of interest they weren't purchasing their access they were actually writing dissertations about how to improve the world those people had great relationships and great expertise and terrible timing so what we've done with transparency and technology in congress and the transparency rules are only two years old now is we've reduced the problem of time and space and I know I'm sounding like the toilet zone here but what we've done with webcast hearings is bring expertise or is the capacity to bring expertise into the room in real time so we've lowered the bar for these transactions that in my view one of the problems in Washington DC right now is it's basically the whole city is like an information cartel it's a private market for influence and this will not stand because we're in a world of peers that have a sense of entitlement to their own destiny and to the sooner we create peaceful, meaningful ways to include more people the better off we're going to be and this to me when you look at polling year after year the two institutions of society that come out on top are experts and people in uniform again this is one of the reasons I think that if you listen to a story told by one of our warriors and in Joseph Campbell's Power of a Myth the warrior is one who leaves the tribe and comes back with a story of change tells a story of change convene in your own hometown with veterans who can talk about this not everybody can do it but there's huge stories of change just waiting to be told around the country and I feel like that's what the American people are thinking of and that's what these new technologies have to offer us because it's going to be the relationships that leverage the technology all technology can do is identify and accelerate it can't create these meaningful relationships at the end of the day that's what works in politics and that I don't think is ever going to change does that make sense does anybody else have any thoughts they want to add on that any of the papers in this volume which is that don't lead necessarily with technology when thinking about some of these issues of the information age because it can lead you into tech centric solutions that may put all the agency with technology and in fact the agency comes from humans and that's something that Jim stresses in this paper yes we absolutely say that people are the core and I think a lot of times talking about cyberspace and I see this in the military all the time we want to make it a tech solution because it's easy to grab on to but in reality this is people doing things to other people either connecting for good either connecting for bad I look at it Facebook is honestly like being in the bar I just get to do it with a lot of different people regardless of time and space but it's still that interaction with people to achieve some kind of objective and we just lose sight of that yep we should probably wrap up so let's take both questions and then the panel can respond I'm Tang Huohui from Chinese Embassy just now I heard this gentleman said, mentioned about West Thafalia Trades it's very interesting because I didn't catch up with your conclusion it says after West Thafalia Trades what kind of religion you decided which country you are depending on whether you're a Protestant it depends on which country you are what's your implication it means in the future what kind of cyberspace the practice or standards you decided what country you are or something else can you elaborate that oh Tim, hang on let's take one more question we'll do it all at once I was just maybe for Mr. Herlong could you identify yourself we're talking about the first two portions of your cognitive dominance I think the understanding of the landscape is particularly pertinent to those two factors and where do you think PII personal identifiable information and the government's collection of PII maybe in the non-IC particularly European populations American populations where do you think the legal line is there thank you why don't you guys respond and then if anybody else on the panel wants to give some sort of wrapping up statement or concluding statement please feel free to do that as well I mean I don't think we thought about PII in terms of looking at cognitive dominance and I'm obviously not a lawyer so if you're looking for kind of my views on should the government should not be collecting I'm trying to understand your question well legally do you think the government is permitted to collect well they do I mean for certain things and there obviously has to be some kind of expectation of privacy and proper use for that information the way and since it's very easy to collect a large amount of information shared very easily are there potentials for abuses sure and that's going to be a challenge and can you always totally rule it out no but the necessary for certain governmental functions so okay Tim you want to respond I think that's a key challenge of what we're trying to figure out that the piece of Westphalia was based on the notion of geographic borders which do not exist in the virtual dimension of cyberspace so to respond to your question we right now face the struggle of trying to figure out how we what legal standards do we choose to adopt the domestic legal standards legal standards we've developed for international affairs and I think right now there's a translation exercise that we have to do and using a lot of what we already know exists in terms of international human nature for example making sure that the Geneva conventions also apply to cyberspace and last year we saw the Human Rights Council affirm that human rights apply offline as well as online but I think that's the key challenge how do we translate existing notions that were framed by national geographic borders into a space where that is not existing in the virtual dimension not at the physical level when it comes to actually how it were that is resting on physical on land etc. Does anybody on the panel want to offer any concluding thoughts just one sentence and that is it seems to me that you have here in the last 10 years anyway is a growing volatility of context what are the building blocks of society and international as well as domestic and secondly a volatility of communication and transparency in the form of these new technologies and it seems to me it's the burden now to figure out what kind of order can be brought out of this because the alternative is kind of international chaos in which all kinds of good and bad things can happen without some kind of rules about how this is going to operate I realize that sounds orwellian but I think if you don't have some kind of order out of this you really are releasing all of these things to all kinds of forces some good and some not anyone else to end on a happier note go civil society we need to nudge that right now in every different way that we can and everybody in this room has more agency that means individual power now than ever before in human history so nudging it on behalf of the life-affirming shared future is really I think bringing it right back down to your laptop did you want to know okay in that case we are just about out of time thank you so much thank you to the new America and thank you to the panelists for a great discussion today