A Review of: Personalised Information Warfare—The New Homeland
Defense, by C Valli, JIW, Volume 2, Number 3, Published 2003

This paper, written when it was estimated there were 500 million personal computers in use, compared to the 5 billion in 2025, was describing an environment that has completely changed. However, the trends pointed out in the paper predicted many of the actualities of the present. The theme of personalized attacks was beginning to gradually increase at the time, with machines being attacked but also specific individuals by activities such as social engineering being perfected. Of course, this was inevitable as people were attached to their ‘own’ machines and networks. Organisations had personal computers since the early 1980s, but they tended to be separated from mainframe applications so, without that link from the Internet to the mainframe, the threat was often considered less important. However, early in this century the links began to merge. In organisations, the convenience of the applications made attacks on the ‘lesser’ networks become an attractive target.

The most astute observation in this paper was the importance of the Internet of Things (IOTs). These devices, which could collect data from various parts of a person’s environment to the more eccentric home ‘experts’, such as Amazon’s Alexa, and Google’s Assistant, became, for many, the source of information. Also, they had the ability to surveille the household all the time and it became a source of personal information. The automatic surveillance of people is a source of concern for many.

The personal details of most people in modern polisociety have become a huge income stream for software suppliers who earn huge amounts by selling data or metadata on users. All this can be personalized. Individual attacks, such as the use of ransomware and the exposure of individual personal data, are a symptom of the almost total capture of the masses on social media. Whilst this paper warns of that, the author could not have foreseen the immense reliance everyone has on big data. The reliance on these applications has meant people giving up their privacy. Even personal relationships are forged on photographic and personal data given freely to the application. It has to be stated that much of this may not be true (Cowley 2017).

The seduction of this mass of data increased exponentially, and the ability of some actors to manipulate and gain benefit from this is becoming obvious. Personal data from ‘free’ applications can be sold at enormous profit.

An example is policing. Big data and its associated search software have been treated as a gift to revolutionise policing (Ferguson 2017). Big Data can be used in personal- or place-based predictive targeting, Real time surveillance and data mining can be used to target subjects. For instance, using metadata form mobile phone towers can track movement of someone over time (well, to be accurate, it is track from the phone not the person per se).

Now although these personalized attacks can be committed on enormous numbers of people, they are still personalized. In fact, Deep Fakes (Schick 2020) can intrude on your whole being—reproducing photographs, voices, and videos that look, move, and sound like you. These are almost perfect. This leaves the control of reality to those who manufacture it on the influential online media they produce, which has a huge audience who derive its information through applications on the Internet. It is such a breakdown of personal security that some are actively patenting their images, voices, and personal traits, so that those who try to emulate them can be sued over copyright.

I think this paper did accurately predict the trends when it was written. However, it could not predict the convergence of many of the technologies, such as nano-technology, cognitive science, and biotechnology (Bainbridge 2007). In the five years between writing the paper, these technologies were expanding exponentially with immense impact on the person, which is still happening today and continues at an ever-increasing rate, making the individual/person almost an irrelevance.

References
Bainbridge, WS 2007, Nanoconvergence, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, US.

Cowley, S 2017, Man vs Big Data, Quarto Publishing, London, UK.

Ferguson, AG 2020, The Rise of Big Data and Policing, New York University Press, New York, NY, US.

Schick, N 2020, Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse, Octopus Publishing Group, London, UK.