Guest blog by Ben Brierley, Vice Consul – Homeland Security and UN Trade, UK Trade & Investment.
Have you ever stopped to think about how much technology has evolved, changing us and the world, over just the past decade? The pace has become more rapid; the technology has become entwined with our lives in ways that even a few years ago we could not imagine. You’re reading this on a blog – a format almost unknown 10 years ago, yet already Twitter and Facebook have captured a portion of the audience bloggers once claimed.
The replacement cycle, the technology window, just keeps getting shorter. Consider visual media: Kodak, for example, made Kodachrome film from 1935 until 2009, eclipsed by the ubiquitous popularity of digital photography. We all probably now have a digital camera on our mobile phones, and can even grant global access to what we capture in an instant. VHS was cutting edge in the 1970s, and became dominant until it was replaced by DVD in the late ‘90s. It seemed like DVDs were hotly competing with Blu-ray discs barely after we had worked out how to use a DVD remote. Digital Video Recorders (Tivo, your cable box, Sky+) have made inroads into the living room – and they themselves may have a shortened shelf life with streaming and on-demand services (iPlayer, Hulu, Netflix Instant) available online. The pace is increasing and the technology is converging. And that convergence is happening in cyberspace.
How do we keep up? How do we stay secure? How do we achieve universal access? How do we ensure that all of our devices “talk” to each other? As we become more reliant on cyberspace, so does our global economy, and there are bigger picture questions that need addressing.
These bigger picture questions are what industry and governments will be discussing at the London Conference on Cyberspace next week. To me, “cyberspace” (the internet/world wide web/the cloud) gives resonance to the fact that this cyber world powers, or connects, much of our new technology. Access to cyberspace has become not just a utility, but a necessity; and consequently, there is an important role in there for government. There is a conversation to be had. This is a public sector, private sector, national and international challenge.
These are new discussion topics, but fundamentally, technological change is as old as time. New technologies have always provided challenges and brought about change. The printing press, steam power, the internal combustion engine, all radically altered the world. Even some of the more specific challenges, like securing communications, are not new.
It was only 70 years ago that the British Government was facing up to the Enigma Machine. Looking a bit like a mechanical typewriter, it was used to encrypt German communications during World War II. At that time, military and civilian staff, some from the Foreign Office—including my grandmother, Valerie Norris—based down in Bletchley Park, used very early computers to decode Enigma traffic. A code created using cutting edge technology was cracked using even more advanced technology.
We cannot ignore cyberspace’s place in our lives and importance we place on being able to have fast, open, reliable access to it. It’s the 21st Century, and though I don’t even have a television at my apartment in New York, I can of course watch televisions shows online. Still, disconnect New Yorkers from the internet? Fuhgeddaboudit.