Throughout history, you can observe that many groups have fought over the information advantage – to know more about other people than those others know in return. Whoever has held the information advantage has usually risen to power.<\/p>\n
We know little of spycraft before ancient times, but we do know that covert messaging was common in the Roman Empire. One well-documented method was to shave a slave\u2019s head, tattoo a message into the scalp, let the hair grow back, and send the slave on foot to the recipient, presumably carrying a decoy message.<\/p>\n
(And you were complaining that PGP messaging takes too long.)<\/p>\n
It\u2019s possible to assume that the concept of \u201cinformation advantage\u201d arose as soon as civilizations broke beyond tribal stage. We can observe groups spying on each other in all parts of recorded history, and even though the winners write the (surviving) history books, we can see that those who knew more were also the ones who came out on top.<\/p>\n
There are many reasons for this. One is the straightforward concept of military intel: if you\u2019re at war with somebody and know about their weaknesses, you can exploit them and get the upper hand. Most of the net generation are perfectly familiar with the concept of the Fog of War, and the value of sending scout drones early in a StarCraft game.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s more subtle than that. If you establish yourself as knowing more than others, for whatever reason, other people will start asking you for information. Information \u2013 perceived truth \u2013 will flow from you to others. This is one of the most powerful positions somebody can be in; it establishes the power of narrative, and it lets a group essentially dictate truth, enlighten people, or poison the news-well according to what fits their interest on any particular day, as long as they are perceived to still hold the information advantage.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to observe that governments have had this role. \u201cOur satellite imagery shows X, Y, and Z on the ground in Farawaystan.\u201d You can\u2019t really dispute it, you have to take that government at their word, simply because you don\u2019t have any expensive satellite network of your own. It\u2019s quite outside of your budget range. Or rather, you had to take them at their word: you don\u2019t anymore. All of a sudden, you have distant acquaintances on the ground in Farawaystan who are confirming or disproving the statement, and usually doing so within minutes.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not hard to see what a power shift this creates \u2013 how the many are taking the power away from the few. It used to take an enormous nation-state-level machine to provide information detail at the satellite-level degree; today, better information can be obtained by the informal network that is the internet.<\/p>\n
Putting it another way: the net generation, the global net generation, has taken the information advantage from the world\u2019s governments, using nothing but their everyday presence and practically no resources at all. And those dethroned governments are absolutely furious about it, and are turning to poisoning the news-well and destroying the net\u2019s utility value by introducing mass surveillance and forcing the network operators\u2019 dirty collaboration in a last-ditch attempt to regain that information advantage \u2013 knowing what everybody\u2019s saying, thinking, planning, discussing.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not going to help. That cat is out of the bag. But it\u2019s going to be a fight.<\/p>\n