Techno-Nationalism: A Growing Scourge

The Snowden Revelations over the last year have had a not-insignificant impact on American-based technology companies’ overseas existing and prospective business.   U.S. multinationals, including IBM, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Qualcomm are all under fire in China, and many are experiencing declining sales in other markets, whether in Europe, Latin America or elsewhere.

While the threat of compromised equipment and software is quite real, whether the doing of State or non-State actors, from a pure technology perspective, such threats cannot be managed by blackballing companies by virtue of their location of headquarters.   Such techno-nationalist approaches fly in the face of the commercial and technological realities of the information and communications technology (ICT) industry, as today's ICT companies are transnational by nature, with research and development, coding and manufacturing spread out across the globe.

The U.S. pioneered the model of modern day techno-nationalism in the context of multiple and opaque market access barriers to China-based telecommunications equipment multinationals, starting in earnest in 2010, and always based on nebulous, never-substantiated and always-prospective national security concerns.  Like their American-headquartered peers, these China-based companies operate worldwide and rely on global supply chains, integrating gear and software from countries across the globe.

Born of Sino-phobia, the American techno-nationalist precedent is now being readily adopted in markets around the world, including China, and being deployed against American firms perceived to be uniquely vulnerable to U.S. Government penetration and compromise.

The reality is that the targeted American companies are no more nor less vulnerable to U.S. or other Government or non-State actors than are companies headquartered elsewhere.  Indeed, witness the reports this Spring that the NSA was intercepting post-shipment Cisco gear to enable backdoor access, demonstrating that compromising technology is national border-agnostic, both in terms of perpetrator and victim.

Techno-nationalism heralds a potential age of 21st century politico-mercantilism that is in absolutely no-one’s best interest and, moreover, does little to nothing to address the very real concerns associated with network and data integrity, or for that matter, privacy.  Rather, the fragmentation of the global ICT industry and related supply chains, as well as the Balkanization of the Cloud, will lead to dramatic and very real adverse implications for the intrinsically global Internet-based society in which we work and live.

In today’s age, no network is secure, nor will any network ever be entirely secure.  But the integrity of networks and data can be bolstered, and confidence in ICT gear and telecommunications and Internet services can be, to some extent, restored.  Techno-nationalism is intrinsically contrary to such goals.

We have reached a critical moment in time in which industry and government must agree to a “pause,” and, further, a conversation about real solutions, rather than trade-distorting and market-disrupting politically-inspired ineffective policies based on irrelevant physical geographical boundaries.

Governments must accelerate the process of agreeing among themselves what is acceptable behavior in terms of cyber activity.  This does not have to be overly-granular to begin with.  Start, for instance, with “We won’t crash your stock market if you won’t crash our electricity grid,” and then work from there.

Governments must also allow and encourage industry to define commercially rational, technologically feasible, and certifiable industry-wide standards, disciplines and best practices for the development and delivery of commercial ICT product and code.  In such an environment, “security assurance” will emerge as a market-based selling point for ICT vendors, alongside technology, quality and price.

These are starting points, they are not the end result.  But they are far, far preferable to the rising crescendo of techno-nationalist policies that are threatening to unravel the ICT industry, an industry that is critical to continued global economic development, growth, productivity and prosperity.

Time For a Reset?

A couple of days ago, The Washington Post detailed fresh Snowden Revelations that show, despite year-long denials from intelligence agencies and Congressional puppets, that, in fact, the NSA has been collecting and storing quite personal information and communications of quite innocent American citizens.

We, the American public, are expected – told - to accept such violations in exchange for protection.  

Whatever good intent aside, and in the context of worry for further and worse abuse, the insightful words of one of our founding fathers ring stridently: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” (Ben Franklin).

How did we get here?

Ours is a young country.  Less than 250 years old, a pre-teen on the global stage.

Yet, we have accomplished great and wondrous things.

We are an exceptional nation.  But, we are losing our way.  

A bit of historical perspective:

Our early “manifest” expansionism aside, we entered the 20^th century isolationist at heart, still stinging from a brutal civil war, still a largely rural and agrarian nation.

Even so, wary of “European entanglements,” we stormed the Continent - to preserve it - during the First World War.

And we recoiled thereafter, an uncertain world power.

Yet, short decades later, we returned to the global stage, once again to preserve a better world, still somewhat naïve, but committed, dedicated, inspired by the ideals that birthed our nation.

Fifty years of Cold War followed.

One of two global superpowers, we sparred and parried with our adversary for five decades, growing a culture of fear within our own borders, “us-vs.-them” a constant drumbeat in our day-to-day lives.

And then, after fifty years, the walls came down.  We emerged, alone, we believed, and deserving, we believed, to serve as a compass for the world.

There followed a decade of respite, relative peace, freedom from cultured fear, and irrational commercial exuberance tied to a revolutionary life-changing, people-connecting wonder.

The Internet changed the way we live and work, and offered liberation to peoples across the globe.

Then the bubble burst.  And then the towers fell.

A culture of fear was reborn.  And our confidence in our exceptionalism and invulnerability were profoundly shaken.

This is the moment in time when we began to lose our way.  The “them” facing “us” context was no longer as black and white as it once seemed to be.  Threats – real or perceived – were everywhere.

Over the last decade, we have succumbed to our culture of fear, we have sacrificed our liberties in a largely vain pursuit of security.  Indeed, we are highly unlikely any more secure from falling towers today than we were on 9-11.

Yet worse, insecure, we have barricaded ourselves behind a wall of self-perceived exceptionalism that flies in the face of what should be the welcome embrace of existing and emerging peers on the global stage.

We are no less exceptional than our past has proven and merited.  But that does not mean that others cannot also be exceptional.  We need to regain perspective.

We have indeed accomplished great and wondrous things. 

We can continue to do so.

For the better part of the last century we have been a tide lifting many boats.

We can continue to be such.

But we need a reset.

We have become a nation often obsessed with absurdities, as often willfully-ignorant, sometimes possessed with delusions of grandeur, progressively divided by “partisan” or other artificial barriers, increasingly lied to by our government, as we also lie to ourselves…

We have, indeed - at least to some extent - lost our way. 

But, it is not too late to re-discover the path we pioneered.  

We – as an informed and civil nation - really need to have a very frank and serious conversation about how we arrived at today, and where we want to go tomorrow.