The 'Gray War' combat zone

The Wires of War: Technology and global struggle for power

Author: Jacob Helberg

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: Rs 595

The “Gray War”: This is how Jacob Helberg labels the conflicts and fractious relationships between Russia, China, North Korea and other autocracies on the one hand, and the world’s democracies and nations with democratic aspirations on the other. The tools of cyberia are the “wires” weaponised to wrest advantage in this geopolitical conflict.  

Two weeks into the Ukraine war 

Mr Helberg’s predictions seem prescient. He is fascinating in much the same way as a good horror film is fascinating, in his exposition of how the internet can be misused to change the future course of history.

Mr Helberg is a senior adviser at the Stanford Center on Geopolitics and Technology, with degrees in international relations, to complement his engineering background and work experience at the cutting edge of cybersecurity. Before joining Stanford, he spent years crafting Google’s internal policies to flag and combat the disinformation tainting the search engine and YouTube. The very day he joined Google, it faced an unprecedented, coordinated assault from state-sponsored hackers.

His life journey interleaved with the tech and the geopolitics, is also interesting. He’s gay, Jewish, and a liberal who lost ancestors to the Holocaust. He’s married to a conservative techie, which is statistically unusual and gives him a window into MAGA-land.

The book’s thesis is broad. Cyberwar can target both the soft and hard “layers” of the Internet and leverage them separately, or together. One layer is “the tubes” as an elderly US Senator described the physical underpinnings, the global telecom system that transports data. This is an exceedingly complex, chaotic mishmash of hardware, including undersea cables, satellite chains, routers, and what-have-you. We’re talking quintillions of different chips, embedded in different pieces of hardware, some of which dates back to the 1980s.

There’s bucket-loads of sensitive data and metadata— personal, corporate, financial, scientific and military — flowing through that system. There’s layers of social media on top, revealing the lives and preferences of people in fractionated detail. The world’s physical infrastructure and its financial infrastructure depend on the Web for functionality, and that dependency is ever-increasing. Power grids work off the Net; so do municipal water supply, metros, railways, nuclear plants, traffic lights, ports, airports, and every 21st century business. Bad actors — individuals and nation-states — can use any or every one of these layers to win influence, or disrupt normal function. A single hacker shut down North Korea’s internet. Armies of hackers based in China have stolen hundreds of billions worth of intellectual property from US corporations and penetrated defence installations.  There’s continuous, all-pervasive surveillance of individuals in many authoritarian regimes — Pegasus shows which way our government is inclined.  

There’s a credible body of opinion indicating that Vladimir Putin was happy to install Donald Trump in the Oval Office because he had dirt on the former president. Senior government officials and politicians anywhere could be susceptible to bribes or blackmail, if something damaging turns up in their personal digital data. Armies of “influencers” based in Russia firehosed fake news into social media to swing public opinion towards Brexit and Trump. The Srivastava Group carried out a somewhat ludicrous but well-funded multi-year campaign to discredit Pakistan in the EU.

Cyber-attacks on infrastructure in Georgia and the Ukraine crippled communications and power grids before, not coincidentally, Russia initiated military actions. Iran’s nuclear programme was set back by years when a sophisticated worm hit centrifuges. India’s stock exchanges and power grids were targeted when there was a border dispute with China. 

While interference with software and content is dangerous enough, what happens under the hood may be worse. China manufactures and supplies components for cellular phones, satellites, cables, and 5G networks — those could have chips with undetectable backdoors. Corporations like Huawei, are setting up next-gen 5G infrastructure across the globe and, as Mr Helberg describes it, China sees a nexus between profit-making corporate giants and the state as routine and would have no qualms demanding access to Huawei’s assets.  

Mr Helberg also makes a cogent point about the political naiveté of the average tech-bro, which makes them unaware of the political significance of the “cool” tools they create, making it even harder to combat a “creeping” takeover.  This tech-driven gray war will shape the balance of power for decades to come.  The saddest thing is that, although the technology is 21st century, the authoritarian mindset harks back millennia. Mr Putin speaks of historic spheres of influence; China builds its OBOR and Strings of Pearls. India crafts laws that give the government sweeping power to collect and requisition private personal data. Despite all the gloom and doom, the author remains optimistic — he believes that, despite the head-start authoritarians have, democracies (especially the US) will eventually catch up and win the Gray War.