“Mistake 404”: this is the message we see on the screen when a device is unable to connect to an internet site, either because it has disappeared from the server or because the link is incorrect.
It is also the title of the book by the Spanish journalist specializing in science and technology Esther Paniagua (Madrid, 1535), a shocking essay in which he raises, among other issues, the possibility that internet collapses and chaos and panic take over the world, because no one -not even governments or states- is prepared to face the apocalyptic scenario that would follow.
In this context, what the author seeks with her work is precisely to draw attention to this terrifying possibility before it is too late.
BBC Mundo hablor with Panigua in the framework of the Hay Festival Arequipa, which is carried out between 3 and 6 of Novemberbre in that city peruana.
Do you really believe is it possible that the internet will collapse one day?
Not that I believe it, that I wake up one day thinking that.
It is an affirmation that comes from science, which has been made by many experts, among them the philosopher and theorist of consciousness Dan Dennett, a reference in the field of neuroscience, someone I admire a lot and whose books I have read.
Based on an interview in which he told Toni García, a journalist friend of mine who interviewed him, that “the internet will collapse and we will experience waves of global panic”, I began to investigate, and I realized that that phrase was grounded.
Immersed in the knowledge of the technologists and other specialists around him, Dennet thinks about the social consequences that an internet blackout would have and what has led us to make those consequences are worse than they should or could be.
Is it then a matter of time that iinternet collapse?
I wouldn’t say it’s safe to 80% that the internet will crash at some point and everything will stop working, but I think it’s highly probable.
What I obviously don’t have is a date, just like nobody else does. It can happen tomorrow, in five years, ten or never, although I think “never” is the least likely of all possibilities.
Everything, absolutely everything depends on the Internet and that makes it especially vulnerable.
We have turned everything into a computer: from critical infrastructure to hospitals, public administrations, universities, companies, our bodies, our clothes, our appliances. Electricity.
So if it fell, everything would stop working, and there would also be a chain effect, dominoes, because it would even affect to services that are not connected to the network.
We have already seen very real simulations but on a very small scale of what could happen.
A cyberattack in 2021 against Belgium’s main telecommunications provider it knocked out most government services, including critical hospital services, parliament, universities, etc. And that only lasted a few hours.
Intelligence services experts assure that it would be from 48 hours when panic would begin to spread, when people would begin to fear for their survival.
Sure, but among all that would stop working would be markets and supermarkets.
Without internet they couldn’t bill, they couldn’t collect more than cash, but we couldn’t get cash from the bank. So even if the products are there, we wouldn’t be able to buy them.
And what if we can’t access food or medicine because we don’t have cash? Not even national security experts are aware of how far that cascading effect would go.
You say in your book that we could run out of iinternet in less than 30 minutes.
That’s how it is. It is something that I discovered in the research process for my book.
In 2010, a group of ethical hackers or good hackers, was called to appear before the United States Senate, given the concern that existed at that time of the internet going down and with it all the associated electronic commerce, which was still incipient at the time.
Those hackers stated that in minutes were able to bring down the entire network through vulnerabilities in a base internet protocol that, to put it bluntly, simple, it makes the information flow in the most efficient way possible.
It is like the internet GPS, that when you want to get from one point to another on the network -for example, by typing the name of a website or clicking on something- decide what is the fastest way to do it.
It was precisely an update of that protocol which, according to the Meta version, made the October 4, 2021 all the systems of the Facebook family fell, from WhatsApp to Instagram, and with that alone the panic spread.
That is one of the possible ways for the Internet to crash, but not the only one.
There are many others, untrue. An attack against Google or Amazon, for example, would mean taking down half the network, with the consequences that this would have for the people and companies that store their information in the clouds.
They are also our phones, which are also a very easy target, although it would also last a short time, because the operators would realize it and would surely solve it in less than those two days that we have before the disaster, probably in a matter of hours.
Or it may happen that a phenomenon of nature, such as a magnetic storm, makes everything fall. It is something extremely unlikely, but if it did happen it would be disastrous, the most catastrophic and dystopian crash, since it would affect not only the network but also devices such as satellites and many other technologies.
En “Error 404” you also talk about the DNS system and accounts that is protected by guardians, something I admit I didn’t know about. How is it possible that a global network is in the hands of people?
It’s a movie story.
The DNS system is crucial, it is the domain name system. What it does is translate the names of each website and assign them an IP address, to allow everything that is online to be connected. Without that kind of database, even if the connected things are there, we wouldn’t be able to access them.
It’s so important that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a governance body of the network, decided in 2010 create a layer of digital security that would be protected by a series of people.
It had to be a reasonable size group: not many people , to avoid dispersion, nor too few, to prevent them from agreeing among themselves to attack it.
In the end, they decided to go 14, seven and seven, because there is a protection system on the east coast of the United States and another on the west coast.
The guardians meet every six months to go updating the DNS system and renewing the digital keys. Each one has a physical key associated with the digital protection layers and has to carry it when they meet.
I know all this because I could interview one of them.
Another possibility you mention is that the governments themselves decide to turn off Internet…
Exact. It is a fact, it is not a possibility.
The biggest case I cite in the book is that of India, which turned off the internet for seven months .
And although the government did it on purpose to see what would happen and prepared for it, it was quite chaotic: it affected all companies, public bodies, the communications network, caused restrictions in freedom of movement, closure of roads and factories, industrial accidents.
It was a disaster and, obviously, there were losses of billions of euros.
And there is another something that I continued to delve into after publishing the book in Spanish, which I added in subsequent translations, which I find very worrying.
Submarine cables. And this road is very vulnerable.
I have continued researching and documenting myself after writing the book, and that is how I found out that all of Yemen, a country with millions of inhabitants, had run out of internet in 2020 following a submarine cable failure caused by a ship’s anchor (which some sources attribute to the Houthis, a rebel group involved in the Yemeni conflict).
That cable carried the 100% of internet traffic in the country. The 20% remaining goes through another cable.
But when all those millions of people tried to connect through that second cable, this collapsed, which left everyone without internet.
That makes us see the vulnerability of these physical infrastructures. Because in addition to an intentional attack, these cables can be cut by mistake, as in fact has happened on several occasions.
That’s right. And that is another of the things I wanted to underline with this book: the increasing ease of carrying out a cyber attack.
As in the beginning of the internet, it was very difficult for a basic user co create a website and now it is very easy, before making a cyberattack it was very complicated and now it is very simple. You don’t even need advanced computer skills.
And it’s also becoming cheaper, in the same way that before computers cost a fortune and didn’t come out of research centers and now everyone in our We have three at home, because a cell phone or a tablet are also computers.
We already have many cases of children who, even without intending to, have carried out cyberattacks while playing.
And since there are so many ways to turn off internet and that this would have dire consequences, do governments and AND Have you had any plans to avoid the chaos that a massive network outage would entail?
The short answer is no. There is no specific plan for internet.
Teleoperators are required to have plans in case there are outages, and it is trusted that these companies are doing their job. And Red Eléctrica (the Spanish state company responsible for energy transmission networks) also has action protocols in the event of a blackout.
But at the government level there is nothing. If there is a fall in the Internet, it will be necessary to see, for example, how people are organized.
That is one of the main fears of Daniel Dennett, who says that we do not have lifeboats.
Formerly When something serious happened, people gathered in churches and organized themselves there. Where are we going today? To the town hall? To the library?
Society is becoming more fragmented, more polarized and more individualized. And being like this, separated from each other, can make the consequences of an event like the internet crash even worse.
More than reinventing it, we still have time to start governing it properly so that it becomes what we wanted it to be and, if not, so that it at least stops being the nest of polarization, manipulation and surveillance in which it is has become and stop violating our rights systematically.
At the beginning, with that utopian idea, we let the internet be commercialized and become in what it is today due to the absence of governance mechanisms.
And now we have to solve it by putting in place those mechanisms.
One proposal that seems very interesting to me is to link digital commerce, the possibility of selling and doing business online, to compliance of privacy and cybersecurity regulations.
Commerce must be subject to compliance with these obligations. In fact, we already have many regulations in this sense, what happens is that they are not complied with. And some are not severe enough.
The trade in personal data, for example, is something that should be directly prohibited.
Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The surveillance capitalism”, says that just as in its day we prohibited the trade in human beings and slavery, because it denigrated people and violated their rights, for the same reason we should prohibit the trade in personal data.
If it is not done, how could we be in five years?
Because in a situation in which citizens and especially minorities are increasingly marginalized and increasingly victims of systems based on data collection that discriminate against them for reasons of gender, age and race, so that, for example, they cannot access certain job offers, or are not selected for a job, or get promoted less, or do not have access to credit to buy a home.
Social inequalities will continue to increase, on the one hand, and privileges will be reinforced, on the other. The rich will be the only ones who can enjoy a right as important as privacy.
You can read all our coverage of Hay Arequipa by clicking here.
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