Read Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace for Free Online

seventy-five
    On March 28, 2011 , the Internet went down in Georgia. For nearly twelve hours citizens had no access to Twitter, Facebook, their favourite YouTube videos, or their primary sources of news and online information. They could not access their online bank accounts or send emails. An information darkness had descended on the Eurasian country. The culprit? A nasty computer virus? Another Russian invasion? The latter would not be out of the question. Three years earlier, Georgia’s Internet was brought to a halt as Russian ground troops invaded the territorial enclave of South Ossetia, the country’s most contested region. Acting in support of the Motherland, scores of patriotic Russian hackers bombarded the Georgian Internet with a massive DDOS attack. It overwhelmed Georgian computers, including the government’s websites and the country’s banking and 911 systems.
    As it turned out, the reason the Georgian Internet went dark this time around had to do with a seventy-five-year-old woman named Hayastan Shakarian, a “poor old woman” who had “no idea what the Internet is.” She had been scavenging for firewood and old copper and accidentally cut a fibre-optic cable running parallel to a railway line, severing a key Internet connection. The effect was not limited to Georgia: because of how routing wasconfigured in the region, Ms. Shakarian’s inadvertent action also shut down the Internet in neighbouring countries. Ninety percent of Armenia’s private and business Internet users were cut off, as were many in Azerbaijan.
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    What is cyberspace? Ask most people this question and they simply shrug: for them it remains a mysterious and technological unknown that “just works.” The term
cyberspace
was coined in the early 1980s by science fiction writer William Gibson, who defined it as a “consensual hallucination,” and that, indeed, is how it often seems. When we log onto Twitter or Facebook through our laptops or mobile phones, we enter into what feels like an ethereal world divorced from physical reality. Our thoughts about cyberspace – if indeed these can be characterized as thoughts at all –generally begin and end with the screen in front of us. We send an email and within seconds it magically appears on a friend’s BlackBerry or laptop. We text a message and it is instantly received by a colleague on the other side of the world. We start up a video on YouTube and seconds later it is streaming in high definition. We take this for granted, don’t even really think about it.
    But what happens in those nanoseconds as the transmission of movies or emails or Internet searches are completed? Information travels at the speed of light, and the processing power of computers is astonishingly fast. It is almost impossible to grasp that the moment a text message is sent thousands of kilometres away the information is transmitted through a complex physical infrastructure spanning multiple political jurisdictions, thousands of private companies and public entities, and numerous media of communication, from wireless radio to fibre-optic cables, like the one Hayastan Shakarian accidentally severed in Georgia.
    What if it were possible to overcome the laws of space and time and follow that email, text, or tweet? What would we see? Where does the data go? Who has access to it? What happens beneath the surface of cyberspace that we don’t see? Although cyberspace may seem like virtual reality, it’s not.Every device we use to connect to the Internet, every cable, machine, application, and point along the fibre-optic and wireless spectrum through which data passes is a possible filter or “chokepoint,” a grey area that can be monitored and that can constrain what we can communicate, that can surveil and choke off the free flow of communication and information.
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    Those constraints begin the moment we interact with the Internet, starting with the instructions that make it all