Position paper
Roma, 01 January 2004
The project on the impact of Information and Communication Technologies on Secuirity is the third of the Vision series on “The Rise of Information Society”. First research was dedicated to the question of the impact of ICTS on the way health is looked after and healthcare is provided; the second was about the future of the car and of the transportation systems in an information based environment.
Vision general thesis is that the convergence of Information and Communication Technologies is going to produce an impact and a change of a magnitude comparable to the Industrial Revolution.
If Information is Power and (economic) Value we will probably witness in the next decades a dramatic redistribution of the former and increase of the latter. The whole infrastructure made of welfare sectors and Government and public administrations will profoundly change both from an institutional and organisation point of view.
This is why the case of the impact of the Net on the way modern societies protect their citizens security and on the way security forces (police, secret service, …) operate, is a very interesting one. And the same applies to the brand new challanges that the diffusion of the ICTs create to individuals and organizations.
IT will demonstrate once more that the Net is not only about virtual promises which never materialise: it is in fact a driving force able to change crucial things like security and the way we ordinarily behave and even the most traditional institutions the ones which are supposed to be the most resistant to change are about to be faced with radical challenges.
The issue to which we dedicate the third project of the Vision series, will make us to see the rise of the Network Society from an angle we had not yet consider sufficiently enough. The research will show how - during the process of building up a different social structure - Internet itself will often come into a conflict with itself, how two radically different idea of what Internet is going to be about, will emerge and clash with each other and who will eventually win.
The position paper is structured as follows:
The vision series on the Rise of Information Society
The scenario: how is the concept of security and the way to deliver it, are going to be transformed by information and communication technologies
Projects objective
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The vision series on the Rise of Information Society and the results of the first projects.
The project on Security is the third publication of a series started up from the conclusions of e-Utopia published in April 2000, dedicated to “The Information Society and its enemies”) with the intention of contributing to the development of a general theory on the possible impact of Information Communication Technologies and the changes necessary to translate such a potential in shared prosperity.
In November 2001, Vision has published the results of the first project dedicated to the change technologies are going to produce in healthcare systems. The publication – Il ritorno della rete –was the basis for the conference More Information, More Choice held at the CNEL, Rome the 30th November 2001. Panelists were representatives of different stakeholders and countries: the policymakers, the consumer groups, the profit and the non profit organisations.
The second project has been finished in December 2003 and has produced a book titled La Macchina che cambiò il Mondo (The Machine who changed the world) ed. Fazi, 2003. It investigated the impact of ICT on transportation systems and the story of the merger (or the clash) between the very symbols of the last and next economic revolution: the Car and the Internet. The book will be presented in March at an international conference due to take place at the Politecnico of Turin.
Both first and second projects are being followed up by a number of seminars (for instance, one is to be delivered on the issue of privacy on health data) and projects whose objective is to realize some of the applications envisaged by the research (for example, Vision is currently working on a project with the European Commission whose aim is to develop City of London’ experience on congestion charge).
The present one is an outline of the project which will probably end the Vision Series with a research on the way technologies will change the whole notion of secutity and the operations of the security forces.
We attach to the present outline the first and the second book of the series, the conference agendas of their presentation, the press release.
The work Vision is carrying out, uses a general framework by which the social and economic change is seen through four major driving forces: the behaviour of the individuals (either consumers or citizens) and their real demand for progress; the business models and the vision of the incumbents (for instance the National Health System, the car industry, the Police Force) providing goods and services; the ability of ICT (the New Economy) to become more functional to people needs; the vision of the policy makers.
Same framework will be applied to the project security.
The Vision series is conducted by Vision in partnership with a number of other international Institutions and think tanks.
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The scenario: how is security going to be transformed by information and communication technologies?
The project is structured in two distinct parts.
In the first we will consider security in the “traditional” sense. How ICTs has increased the capacity of the Society to make less convenient, easier to detect, more likely to pinish crime in different forms (from common delinquency, to organized crime up to terrorism on global scale)? Which are the killer applications in what is increasingly called digital “warfare”? How did the very same technologies make the society as a whole more vulnerable? And which risks do they present in terms of crimes committing individuals and associations become stronger from an organizational point of view?
Which could be the recommendations from a policy (laws and police force) point of view in order to amplify opportunitieds for bettering security and legality and reduce the risks?
As for the other projects of the Series, Vision will consider not only the tools that technologies provide to security forces to do better and more efficiently their job. We will also consider the change which is necessary to make the police able to fully take advantage of the potential of the Networked Society and the fundamental change that technologies are already producing to the vulnerability of modern societies and to the whole notion of security. Once more the police (like all other public organisations) will face at the same time not only a technological upgrading and a vast internal change management but also a radical re definition of their mission and core business.
We expect this first part to in fact clarify (through a number of methods including quantitative analysis) quite a number of stereotypes that tend to be generated by media. In fact security is apparently one of those issues were psicology and mass psicology tend to picture questions in a not always facts based fashion.
In fact, few confusions on what different phenomena are about will be probably encountered even in the second part of the research on digital security.
Here, very different issues (virus and worms jeopardising the efficiency of business concerns, risks for individual and organization privacy, spamming, protection of intellectual ownership) are often put under the same umbrella of “digital security”. In fact, each question needs to be defined and addressed separately and each requires different problem setting and instruments.
We will try to investigate how technologies itself can provide solutions and which are the risks of producing regulation without having carefully weighted the many conflicting and all socially relevant interests involved into the question.
.. (to be developed) ..
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But how, in pratical terms, will the change happen? Which will be the conditions?
The building up of an Information-based Security System adequate require that the behaviours, the decisions, the willingness, the language of the most relevant stakeholders converge. It will ask for the simultaneous creation of the right conditions on the side of (to be developed)
1. Citizens;
2. Organizations using ICTS;
3. The government and the polcie force;
4. The ICT and the media contents producers
Projects objective
Purpose of the research is to contribute to understand:
1. The potential of transforming the way security can be delivered and maintained in an information based system. We envisage to
1.1. define the most interesting applications through case studies;
1.2. develop (two) scenarios for both a medium (five years) and long (twenty) years timeframe (and with a differentiation according to country or macro Region situation – and with a focus on Italy and EU).
2. The challenges and the opportunities standing in the way of the main stakeholders: citizens, client organizations, policy makers and police forces, technologies producers.
Within this framework project will contribute to develop possible answers to questions such as:
1. How will the objective, the nature of Security is going to change in five and in twenty years time? Which are the most convincing methods to settle the definition problem that the “security and internet” question seems to often generate?
2. Which are constraints to the change happening? How really strong is the demand for progress from the people (citizens, organizations, ..) involved and how quickly will they actually adopt technologies? Which are the trade offs between security and seamlessness of the communication systems that Internet was supposed to provide and what does people (and different segments of different age) seem to value most? Which countries are most effectively weathering the change and are there institutional framework which have got clear competitive advantages? Which are the most interesting cases and experiments that the international outlook provides?
3. How can the various stakeholders make their interactions more efficient and collaborative?
POSSIBLE PROJECT STRUCTURE AND BOOK SYNOPSIS
Based upon above concepts, the project may be tentatively articulated as follows:
Part One: Security in the physical world
1. Security and icts as a modifier of the balance of power between criminal organizations and police force
2. Ict as a lever to stengthen criminal organizations power
3. Ict as a multiplier of police force capacity to monitor, prevent and contrast crime
4. The political impact and advise for a strategy
Part Two: Security in the digital world
1. Digital security as a bottleneck for the development of network society
2. A risk assessment of digital “insecurity”
3. Internet against internet: the options and the risk of overshooting
4. The case for regulation and the future of digital governance
A project like the one we are defining will, obviously, not have the expectations to reach precise forecasts on the various elements it will investigate. In fact, the approach will be more to understand how the various factors will interact among each other than studying them in isolation. The research will be the development of a framework Vision has already applied to other cases and the end product will be a progress result meant to be the basis of further development.
The project will be conducted through case studies collected on an international basis, interviews with all parties involved (Policy Makers, Police Force, Authorities in charge of protecting privacy and similar rights, ICT providers, ..), data collections, market research, focus groups with selected number of customers. Vision also expects to use the sponsors as sounding board of the conclusions it will gradually reach and provider, wherever it may be possible, of state of the art knowledge.
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Vision has just recently started the third and last research on how information and communication technologies have revolutionized the very concept of security and the processes and organizations by which security is delivered. The project called Internet vs. Internet will be concluded by 2005.