Henry Farrell: prediction

Transcript context

…Sure. But what should we do? If you imagine Huawei controlling Germany’s 5G network, that sounds pretty dire, almost like letting the KGB run your phone system. We probably need to wake up to the fact that we’re going to be in a world where there are going to be security vulnerabilities, and there’s, more or less, not very much that we can do about it. The key questions to think about here is there’s different tradeoffs. First of all, you can think about the tradeoffs of surveillance, which I think is what most people think about with Huawei. And there is a good reason why a number of countries, including US allies, have decided to opt for Huawei because they figure they’re already being listened into by the United States. They’re probably going to be listened into by China anyway. So what matter does it make? It probably doesn’t make all that much difference. Whichever technology you’re going to use, there’s probably going to be some way of penetrating it. The more complicated, more difficult question is whether or not Huawei, or other kinds of technology companies like it, could be linked into other forms of systems in ways which might pose an active security threat which goes further than just listening. This is something that Bruce Schneier, for example, has talked about in a wonderful book that came out about nine months ago called Click Here to Kill Everybody, where he more or less talks about the huge security risks which are associated with the so-called internet of things, which turns out to be an internet of really, really badly designed and badly secured things. And when one thinks about the ways in which, for example, what kinds of consequences it might have if you have a breakdown of communication at the time that there is a military attack — that’s the kind of thing that people really need to think carefully about. So I would guess that the best way to think about this is to, on the one hand, accept the fact that there’s going to be some level of surveillance that is happening; that given current technologies, there’s always going to be some kind of a back door there to be exploited. On the other hand, try to make critical systems as secure and robust as possible and think as much as possible about things like multiple redundancies, not necessarily economically efficient in terms of market, but nonetheless things which will allow you to secure yourself and have possible backup systems in the case that something major is suddenly compromised. I think that’s where we’re moving towards — a world which is much less going to be about trying to pare things down to the minimum in search of economic efficiency and much more about robustness, redundancy, and trying to think carefully through the fact that we live in a fundamentally insecure world. People are beginning to take advantage of it, and we need to gear up in order to think better about this. But if I call you now on my iPhone to your iPhone, China can’t listen in, right? We’d be giving them the whole key to all communications.…

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