The Geopolitics of Data

Dragon’s Technological Jive Towards A Geo-Political Jibe

Geo-Political Construct

Wars, it is said, are led in the name of a highly intangible construct of geo-politics. The impact that they have on nation states, in fact, dictates the power play and defines the world order. Some have referred to the concept as a Territorial Trap of geo-political imagination. The concept is, therefore, fluid and runs through the fingers of the altruists. Since the philosophy is orchestrated by well-articulated and established international relations theories, over time, no great ripples were felt in the manner the events panned out, at least not until the turn of the 21st Century. It was aptly summed in Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of the Civilizations’, highlighting the perspective of a new post cold-war world order defined by ‘culture’ rather than by ‘ideology’. Both ‘cohesion’ and ‘conflict’ were inherent, as per Huntington, in culture. What if this culture and ideology are cocktailed with technology?

In the preceding four years, geo-politics has been imparted a twist through a pseudo name, ‘Trumpism’, a term reflective of the political ideology and style of governance associated with Donald Trump, the outgoing US President. His election itself was mired in controversy, when the US intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had interfered with the elections to favour Trump’s candidacy over Clinton’s in a “sweeping and systematic” manner. The ‘sweep and systematic’ expression has manifestations that transcend into the technological domain and flirts with artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics. Trumpism, of course, over the following four years was to reverberate across the foreign policy templates, challenging established fundamentals.

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Centered on immigration policies with ‘America-first’ slogan, trade regulations, ejecting out of climate accords and a rejection of social progressivism, Trump captured the imagination of the world, in salvaging situations in his inimitable style for power projection. Trump became the first sitting US president to cross the 1953 armistice line separating North and South Korea in 2019, joining Kim Jong Un for a meeting to re-launch the stalled nuclear talks.

He recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018; announced replacement (read sacking) of his defence secretary Mark Esper over Twitter; was instrumental in sensational secret parleys between the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Saudi Arabia along with Mossad intelligence chief Yossi Cohen with Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS) and US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, that hints at altering the Middle East dynamics forever. The net assessors will do well to unfurl ‘Future Scenarios/Predictions’, factoring such un-institutional chagrins. Whilst, these personality-based neuro-transmitters – endorphins can spin outcomes – the jury is still out for their lasting impact on geo-politics. Where does that leave the ‘Dragon’ in the room – China?

Dragon’s Technological Jive

China’s gross domestic product (GDP) is five times and military expenditure four times India’s. The Print’s editor-in-chief, Shekhar Gupta, explains ‘Data-Mining’ in his series ‘Cut the Clutter’, as an institutionalized mechanism by Chinese companies specifically designated to collect Big Data in respect of targeting high profile Indian individuals with the sole purpose of connecting the dots on the individual’s life preferences and habits. The aspect has also been kindled in a recently released documentary on Netflix, titled, “The Great Hack”, drawing parallel with Cambridge Analytica’s methodology in influencing society at large, leveraging the power of data and social media.

Data mining was first invented by the US military to hunt down Chinese Communist cells operating in the US code named, “Able Danger”. This was short-closed as it breached US privacy laws, until post 9/11, when data-mining became a part of intelligence, surveillance & reconnaissance (ISR) to hunt down terrorists. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) uses it extensively for scraping data from social media platforms, incorporating a smart digital layer in all its operations mixing the capabilities like Big Data, AI and Internet of Things (IoT), under the umbrella of fifth-generation warfare.

Nations that have access to data prosper, wield influence and can dominate. Last year, William Dalrymple’s book “The Anarchy”, on dominance of East India Company, had analogies that India had better imbue. ‘Digital Colonisation’, as explained by Vinit Goenka, a member of the governing council of Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS), and an expert in information systems, exemplifies China’s antics at impregnating societies by breaching data sovereignty, through mass proliferation of their apps. The aspect was brought to the fore when 59 Chinese apps were resultantly banned in India. This highlighted to the world the seemingly innocuous yet repugnant and malicious tactic adopted by China to capture preferences, likes and moods of the majority, driving trends and economies.

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As an aside from Data harnessing, the Eastern Ladakh imbroglio with China reflects an altogether different story. The sheer amassing of forces and weapons on the opposing sides, hardly leaves room for a military solution. In spite of the hyped de-escalation and disengagement plans, an apparent stalemate appears to be ensuing and in all probability, winter deployment will be frozen (pun intended) – on ‘As is Where is’ basis. This posture suits China, as it affords testing the staying power of its own troops, operationally deployed in super high-altitude area for the first time, as well as buying time for clarity on the renewed US foreign policy under the freshly elected Biden Democrat Presidency. On the other hand, it affords ample opportunity to India to utilize the Sector as a test-bed for Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured (IDDM) defence equipment and ammunition, as part of the Indian government’s initiative of Atmanirbhar Bharat, according top-most priority to homegrown assets for subsequent capital procurement. Data, it appears in the instant case is but a statistical entity.

Chinese declaratory philosophy of ‘Winning local wars under Informationised conditions’, is well espoused by the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). The philosophy includes electronic warfare (EW), cyber-hacking, spoofing, surveillance and now social engineering through social media tools. In the military domain conventionally, India will need to muster a conglomeration of strategies ranging from prevention to avoidance to fighting in an escalatory matrix, to deal with China, post capability generation. But in the fifth-generation realm, there is no pecking order of the sorts and the creation of the post of the Deputy Chief of the Army Staff (Strategy), overseeing operations of another rechristened appointment of Director General of Information Warfare signals India’s resolve to counter China’s Informationalised Wars with different size of arrows in its quiver.

Norwegian diplomat, Christian Louis Lange, during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1921, stated, “Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master”. This quote conveys the flip side of technology infusion without materially studying the impact on the existing structures and organization. If the theory of contextualization is re-visited and the relationship between context and text in its design and categorical scheme is articulated, then it would be clear through the ways-ends-means-analysis that the character of warfare is forever changing, adapting to the evolving context. The competitive capability generation that accompanies every technology spiral must be incorporated post overcoming the weighted institutional inertia. As long as the process is agile and faster than the adversarial pace of incorporation, the rate of change will invariably yield the desired operational outcomes. In the Indian context, the sheer size and volumes of the Indian inventory and the life-cycle philosophy with attendant reserves and spares make this a herculean task.

I wrote in “Sensor Fusion: the Convoluted Specter”, published on of 30 June 2020 in ‘Medium.com’, “In the 2015 sci-fi movie, ‘Ex Machina’, it follows that a programmer has been instructed by his boss to give the “Turing Test” (a test that compares human intelligence to a computer’s) to a human-like robot. The interesting part depicts how Ava, the protagonist robot, gains her knowledge. Ava’s intelligence comes from “Blue-Book”, a fictional search engine, like Google. She can collect information from what people share online and build her behavioral patterns accordingly. This has evolved into what is loosely being referred to as ‘Deep Learning’ by the machines. Google recently released the “Dataset Search”, a free tool for searching 25 million publicly available datasets, using dataset publishers for use of the open standards to describe their dataset’s metadata. With this treasure trove of data to harness, the scavenging software algorithms can get meaty chunks to train for perfect processes and responses”. Unquote. Hopefully, this drives home the point on the lethality of Datasets.

Conclusion

Historically, innovation has always crept out of the military’s citadel and stirred the civil enterprise into honing and recalibrating the expose to fine-tune the anticipated use-case. This quick adaptation has left the military bounds behind in its own invention, while the corporates amortize the concept and make finer versions available to be re-packaged and sold to the military.

‘Weaponisation of data,’ was a term first coined by Apple CEO Tim Cook, in respect of information about users of the digitized world through either consumerism or social media platforms. Juxtaposed with suitable algorithms, this personalized data could be tempered to derive meaningful inferences that if used insidiously, conjure grave harm to the otherwise innocuous individual behavior. Weaponizing data for social engineering, politics, corporate competition and anything that gives a fillip to one upmanship has picked pace amongst the data scientists.

Digital battle space enthused with networked system of systems appears to be the renewed operating paradigm. The pace at which defence modernisation and transformation must ensue in order to attune with the technological developments in the civil applications will need the Indian Ministry of Defence (MoD) to look at adoption of technologies ‘differently’ and far removed from the ‘typical’. In this, the MoD would do well to adopt what the mechanised forces are typically trained to do for their operational planning – consider the desired end-state and carry out regressive planning for adoption of technology through phases of adoption and timelines.

Data Localization, Balkanization of the Internet, Concept of the Splinternet and Digital sovereignty are some of the terms that today go on to define the Geo-politics of Data and as a moderator commented at the recently concluded Carnegie’s Global Technology Summit, perhaps Politics itself. So, can technology decide geo-political outcomes? Perhaps not. But, it certainly can shape those outcomes. Can a rogue nation tilt the balance of power towards unilateralism, leveraging the power of technology? Well, you decide!

India requires to publish its National Security Strategy (NSS) document sooner than later, factoring the changes dictated by, amongst others, the adversarial infusion of technology. After all, finding new ways to do new things is ‘Innovation Oriented Data Analytics’; finding new ways to do old things is ‘Process Oriented Data Analytics’ and requiring superior data for success and focus on the future, is ‘Strategy Oriented Data Analytics’! The time has come to stare reality squarely in the face.