Governments don't understand cyber warfare. We need hackers | Rodrigo Bijou

160,626 views ・ 2016-01-21

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00:12
In 2008, Burhan Hassan, age 17,
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boarded a flight from Minneapolis
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to the Horn of Africa.
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And while Burhan was the youngest recruit,
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he was not alone.
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Al-Shabaab managed to recruit over two dozen young men
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in their late teens and early 20s
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with a heavy presence on social media platforms like Facebook.
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With the Internet and other technologies,
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they've changed our everyday lives,
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but they've also changed recruitment, radicalization
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and the front lines of conflict today.
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What about the links connecting Twitter,
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Google and protesters fighting for democracy?
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These numbers represent Google's public DNS servers,
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effectively the only digital border crossing
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protesters had and could use
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to communicate with each other, to reach the outside world
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and to spread viral awareness
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of what was happening in their own country.
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Today, conflict is essentially borderless.
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If there are bounds to conflict today,
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they're bound by digital, not physical geography.
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And under all this is a vacuum of power
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where non-state actors, individuals and private organizations
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have the advantage over slow, outdated military and intelligence agencies.
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And this is because, in the digital age of conflict,
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there exists a feedback loop
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where new technologies, platforms like the ones I mentioned,
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and more disruptive ones,
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can be adapted, learned, and deployed by individuals and organizations
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faster than governments can react.
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To understand the pace of our own government thinking on this,
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I like to turn to something aptly named
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the Worldwide Threat Assessment,
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where every year the Director of National Intelligence in the US
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looks at the global threat landscape,
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and he says, "These are the threats, these are the details,
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and this is how we rank them."
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In 2007, there was absolutely no mention of cyber security.
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It took until 2011, when it came at the end,
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where other things, like West African drug trafficking, took precedence.
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In 2012, it crept up, still behind things like terrorism and proliferation.
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In 2013, it became the top threat,
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in 2014 and for the foreseeable future.
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What things like that show us
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is that there is a fundamental inability today
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on the part of governments to adapt and learn in digital conflict,
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where conflict can be immaterial, borderless, often wholly untraceable.
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And conflict isn't just online to offline, as we see with terrorist radicalization,
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but it goes the other way as well.
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We all know the horrible events that unfolded in Paris this year
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with the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks.
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What an individual hacker or a small group of anonymous individuals did
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was enter those social media conversations that so many of us took part in.
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#JeSuisCharlie.
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On Facebook, on Twitter, on Google,
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all sorts of places where millions of people, myself included,
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were talking about the events
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and saw images like this,
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the emotional, poignant image of a baby with "Je suis Charlie" on its wrist.
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And this turned into a weapon.
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What the hackers did was weaponize this image,
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where unsuspecting victims,
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like all of us in those conversations,
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saw this image, downloaded it
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but it was embedded with malware.
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And so when you downloaded this image,
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it hacked your system.
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It took six days to deploy a global malware campaign.
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The divide between physical and digital domains today
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ceases to exist,
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where we have offline attacks like those in Paris
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appropriated for online hacks.
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And it goes the other way as well, with recruitment.
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We see online radicalization of teens,
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who can then be deployed globally for offline terrorist attacks.
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With all of this, we see that there's a new 21st century battle brewing,
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and governments don't necessarily take a part.
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So in another case, Anonymous vs. Los Zetas.
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In early September 2011 in Mexico,
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Los Zetas, one of the most powerful drug cartels,
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hung two bloggers with a sign that said,
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"This is what will happen to all Internet busybodies."
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A week later, they beheaded a young girl.
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They severed her head, put it on top of her computer
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with a similar note.
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And taking the digital counteroffensive
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because governments couldn't even understand what was going on or act,
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Anonymous, a group we might not associate as the most positive force in the world,
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took action,
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not in cyber attacks, but threatening information to be free.
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On social media, they said,
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"We will release information
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that ties prosecutors and governors to corrupt drug deals with the cartel."
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And escalating that conflict,
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Los Zetas said, "We will kill 10 people for every bit of information you release."
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And so it ended there because it would become too gruesome to continue.
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But what was powerful about this
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was that anonymous individuals,
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not federal policia, not military, not politicians,
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could strike fear deep into the heart
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of one of the most powerful, violent organizations in the world.
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And so we live in an era
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that lacks the clarity of the past in conflict,
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in who we're fighting, in the motivations behind attacks,
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in the tools and techniques used,
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and how quickly they evolve.
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And the question still remains:
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what can individuals, organizations and governments do?
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For answers to these questions, it starts with individuals,
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and I think peer-to-peer security is the answer.
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Those people in relationships that bought over teens online,
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we can do that with peer-to-peer security.
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Individuals have more power than ever before
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to affect national and international security.
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And we can create those positive peer-to-peer relationships
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on and offline,
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we can support and educate the next generation of hackers, like myself,
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instead of saying, "You can either be a criminal or join the NSA."
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That matters today.
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And it's not just individuals -- it's organizations, corporations even.
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They have an advantage to act across more borders,
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more effectively and more rapidly than governments can,
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and there's a set of real incentives there.
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It's profitable and valuable
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to be seen as trustworthy in the digital age,
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and will only be more so in future generations to come.
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But we still can't ignore government,
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because that's who we turn to for collective action
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to keep us safe and secure.
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But we see where that's gotten us so far,
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where there's an inability to adapt and learn in digital conflict,
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where at the highest levels of leadership,
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the Director of the CIA, Secretary of Defense,
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they say, "Cyber Pearl Harbor will happen." "Cyber 9/11 is imminent."
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But this only makes us more fearful, not more secure.
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By banning encryption in favor of mass surveillance and mass hacking,
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sure, GCHQ and the NSA can spy on you.
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But that doesn't mean that they're the only ones that can.
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Capabilities are cheap, even free.
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Technical ability is rising around the world,
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and individuals and small groups have the advantage.
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So today it might just be the NSA and GCHQ,
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but who's to say that the Chinese can't find that backdoor?
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Or in another generation, some kid in his basement in Estonia?
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And so I would say that it's not what governments can do,
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it's that they can't.
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Governments today need to give up power and control
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in order to help make us more secure.
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Giving up mass surveillance and hacking and instead fixing those backdoors
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means that, yeah, they can't spy on us,
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but neither can the Chinese
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or that hacker in Estonia a generation from now.
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And government support for technologies like Tor and Bitcoin
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mean giving up control,
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but it means that developers, translators, anybody with an Internet connection,
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in countries like Cuba, Iran and China, can sell their skills, their products,
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in the global marketplace,
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but more importantly sell their ideas,
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show us what's happening in their own countries.
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And so it should be not fearful,
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it should be inspiring to the same governments
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that fought for civil rights, free speech and democracy
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in the great wars of the last century,
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that today, for the first time in human history,
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we have a technical opportunity
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to make billions of people safer around the world
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that we've never had before in human history.
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It should be inspiring.
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(Applause)
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