How will technology reshape the security landscape?

Imagine that a terrorist cell has hacked your IQ-enhancing brain
implant and is forcing you to create a biological weapon of mass
destruction in your home laboratory. However, sensors in your
“smart flat” have picked up your suspicious patterns of
behaviour, and alerted the police to arrest you.
A far-fetched scenario? Perhaps, but it is at least a plausible one
according to members of the Global Strategic Foresight
Community , launched in Davos last month with a compilation of
individual reflections on what the future holds. Taken together,
these perspectives point to three trends that could redefine
security threats and responses.
First, technology could greatly magnify the destructive power of
individuals and small groups; second, it could also increase our
vulnerability to attack; and third, it could create effective new
ways to pre-empt security threats – albeit at a price.
Will individuals be able to make and deploy weapons of mass
destruction?
A recurring theme in members’ perspectives is the growing
empowerment of the individual to act independently, for better or
worse. “Individualization is about to reach new stages, enabled
by new technologies, low entry barriers and new value systems”
and exemplified by the “rise of the DIY economy,” points out
Trudpert Schelb , a member of the community.
People have already figured out how to use 3D printers to make
guns. In the future, we may be able to manufacture weapons of
mass destruction in our own homes. The prospect, writes
another member, Jerome Glenn , is known as SIMaD, or Single
Individual Massively Destructive. Synthetic biology is a fast-
developing field, with affordable equipment already enabling
DIYers to tinker with DNA and do things like make plants glow; in
the future, it could be as easy to manufacture a deadly physical
virus as it is now to write a computer virus.
Kathleen Hicks, a member of the community, includes
“improvised explosive devices and handheld rocket launchers,
robotics and other unmanned systems such as drones” in the
technologies that will give individuals and small groups
“increasing scope to threaten large numbers of people and have
a strategic impact with relatively little investment”. Threats to
security will be exacerbated by urbanization : “Population density
and poverty create conditions for civil unrest and technology
enables like-minded people to easily connect with each other.
The fast-paced advances in cheap military-like technologies
could potentially lead as far as lawlessness taking hold in
megacities.”
Could our minds and bodies be hacked?
Further magnifying the risks, future individuals with malevolent
intent and access to destructive power could be smarter than we
are today. Arguing that “humans will become cyborgs as our
biology becomes integrated with technology”, Glenn writes: “In
the coming decades, we will augment our physiological and
cognitive capacities as we now install new hardware and
software on computers. This will offer access to genius-level
capabilities and will connect our brains directly to information
and artificial intelligence networks.”
Technology that makes individuals more powerful may also
make us more exposed. “We can anticipate that buildings will
‘talk’ to each other,” predicts Chris Luebkeman – and while
“facilitating the kinds of data collection and systematic
interaction that will revolutionize whole cities”, this development
will also create whole new areas of vulnerability.
Our homes could be hacked – and perhaps even our minds and
bodies themselves. Glenn writes: “Connecting human brains
directly to information and artificial intelligence networks raises
the question of whether minds could be hacked and manipulated.
How can we minimize the potential for information or perceptual
warfare and its potential consequence of widespread paranoia?”
Could technology make it easier to predict and prevent crimes?
Technology will offer new ways to counter the security threats it
creates. One community member, Derrick Gosselin, writes: “A
specific domain of application of predictive analytics emerging
today is its use to anticipate security threats and criminal
behaviour. Several police forces already analyse Twitter and text
messages as part of their activities to anticipate criminality and
use ‘predictive policing’ algorithms to decide where officers
should patrol by analysing what areas of a city typically see
what kinds of crime at what time of day.”
Luebkeman’s expectation of buildings that talk to each other
also raises the prospect of the data they generate being used in
the same way as data from social media, to monitor and
anticipate individuals’ behaviour.
However, Gosselin makes the point that harnessing big data to
fight crime and terrorism will “have a profound impact on our
society and democratic rights”, and notes: “Predictive analytics
is all about correlation and interpretation, not causality and
knowledge; it therefore raises fundamental moral and ethical
questions related to privacy and the presumption of innocence.”
As technology creates new threats and new capacities to
respond, what kind of approaches are we willing to countenance
to balance individual freedoms with the need for security? To
shape the future we want, we need to address this question now.