Upon being accepted into Harvard, I befriended almost fifty other pre-frosh via social media. These were people that I had never met before, but with whom I had found something in common. We would talk about our senior years, all the cool things we were looking forward to at Harvard, and how stressed we were about going to college and leaving our families. As we became closer, much of the conversation shifted towards jokes, personal conversations, political discussions (especially through the 2016 Primary cycle), and, of course, memes.

Again, these were people I had never met before. And yet, I was chatting with these people more often than  I was with my own friends.

These are people who I thought could be my closest friends, and yet, now that I’m actually here, I talk to none of them. Sure, if I see them I’ll say hi, but they’re nothing more than acquaintances.

The fact is that people are very different online and offline. Through social media, people want to always build a facade of happiness. To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, people have “both private and public positions” on topics, where they only display what they want their friends to see on social media with everything from photoshopped, edited, and filtered photos or Snapchat Stories showing them.

This leads to a rift. People often try to Google or Facebook-search new people that they have met, attempting to garner as much information about their new acquaintance as they can. Heck, the whole point of Facebook is to see what your friends are up to all the time. This means that followers of user accounts can develop an impression of the user that is based only on what the user allows their followers to see, creating a fake persona. Many judgements can be made by looking through the list of “likes” that users have (sorry, Rachel), but these are not necessarily correct. It’s hard to be completely authentic online because people can’t see you for who you are. You self-select and upload everything yourself, removing any context from the situation.

Cyber crimes have been a rising issue that countries and organizations have been attempting to tackle for years, with an increased sense of urgency. There are four ways to deal with cyber leaks and cyber crimes:

Stop them before they happen

Cybersecurity, encryption, and strong practices are all extremely useful and potent. Larry Lessig, the Harvard professor famous (actually… no one really knew about him… ) for trying to run for President in 2016, points to the idea that “a fence can keep people out as much as a police officer can”. With legislation, smart coding architecture, social norms that shame people, and market practices bolstered by governments with taxes and subsidies, cyber crimes can be tackled.

Unfortunately, fences can be overrun (and so can walls between US and Mexico that Mexico won’t pay for) and police officers can be bypassed. No matter how many McAfee alerts you get, at some point, you’re gonna mess up. Maybe you didn’t back up your files well. Maybe you clicked on a phishing link. Maybe you use a PC instead of a Mac. Who knows. The question then is, how do you react?

Punish the attackers

If you can find the attackers, you can punish them. All of these punishments would depend on being able to attribute the crimes to the attackers. In many cases, applications have built in tools that allow you to do so. Otherwise, the internet’s infrastructure has built in mechanisms as well.

Punishment protocols break down into three categories:

Civilian vs Civilian

These sorts of crimes are treated similarly to regular crimes. If an American attacked and American, the rules and punishments are simple; the American government comes down on the American attacker.

If the attacker is foreign, however, the process is a little harder. If America has a treaty with the other nation, then the foreign government is obliged to assist America in extraditing or, at the very least, punishing the attacker. If America does not have such a treaty, as in Belarus or Russia, then all America can do is lean on the nation and hope that they do something. The FBI can work with the Belarusian national security agencies to catch the criminal or work with Interpol, but there’s no guarantee.

Nation vs Nation

This is basically war. Israel and the US sabotaging Irani nuclear refinement facilities is an attack. Pakistanis hacking into Indian Air Force jets is an attack. Russian hacks of DNC email servers is an attack. Whether either party treats it as an all out war is a separate issue, but that’s what it could easily lead to.

Nation vs Civilian

This is also basically an attack. A prime example of this would be North Korea’s hack of Sony Pictures that cost the company $50 million. This is basically the same thing as North Koreans coming into America and bombing something (albeit, maybe with fewer casualties). It’s an attack on American citizens and thus is an act of war.

Deal with it

This is the resilience approach. It’s possible that you can fight through the attack and then leave it alone. For example, since websites across the US went dark as a result of a DDOS attack on a DNS provider, there has been little retaliation. It’s not worth it. The DNS provider came back up, websites are running fine, and security protocols have been improved, but that’s about it. Sometimes, you just have to move on.

Resignation

Just give up. Give in. If they’re asking for money, pay it. Otherwise, give up and move on. Sorry.

A few weeks ago, the United States handed over control of the Domain Name System (DNS) to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), meaning that the US Department of Commerce no longer controls the allocation of domain names for websites. This means America doesn’t own the internet anymore. Right?

Well, no matter what Sen. Ted Cruz says, that’s just false. While Sen. Cruz and Attorney Generals from Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Texas were concerned about autocratic regimes dictating terms on the internet, they failed to realize that no one governs the internet. No one can truly ever control it. The internet feels sort of like a wayward child. Sure, the US government developed it in conjunction with dozens of scientists, but they have lost the right to actually control it, according to Barlow.

Unfortunately, control over the internet is very real. Censorship is rampant around the world. In India and Turkey, social media are regularly taken down and monitored to reduce rallying cries for protests and anti-government sentiment. “Morphed” (or Photoshopped) pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi often land normal kids in jail.

I had the fortunate experience to attend the WikiConference USA in 2015, held in Washington, DC. There, I attended a talk on Wikipedia censorship in Russia and China, where they decried the lack of freedom to criticize the governments or post about potentially “obscene” content. Wikipedia is run only by volunteers and the Wikimedia Foundation, who work together to advocate for open information and the open internet, but even they recognize that, in some cases, self-censorship can help. In Russia, articles about Marijuana no longer discuss how to smoke/consume it after those articles had been banned. While this may not be ideal, it allows for a solid compromise.

On the flip side, when the album cover for Virgin Killer, by Scorpions, was found to publicly depict child pornography, the Internet Watch Foundation blacklisted any references to the album in the United Kingdom. This accidentally barred editing access to Wikipedia across the country. The question remains, however, do governments have a right to bar “obscene” content in the same way they do on TV and Radio?

I would say that, yes, they do; however, they, in practice, can’t. The internet is a truly global system. TV and Radio are all local entities. It’s expensive and capital-intensive to set up a radio station or a TV channel. Reaching millions of people is near-impossible without a lot of investment. These barriers to entry make TV and Radio easy to regulate. On the internet, on the other hand, anyone and everyone can post whatever they want from wherever they want for whomever the want (read: everyone). This means that even if the government were to shut down websites and sources of information, others could easily pop-up. Workarounds, such as proxies, are prevalent. Without literally uprooting infrastructure, like North Korea, it’s impossible to actually bar access to content on the internet.

So, while no one may own the internet, governments can and do ban access to content. They have the right to regulate what their own citizens see and consume, but ultimately are unable to sustain/enforce those bans.

I am currently taking a seminar taught by Dean Michael Smith and Prof. Jim Waldo called “What is the Internet, and What Will It Become?”. Let me start off by saying that this in itself is extremely cool. I can’t believe that, as a freshman, in my first semester, I’d have two amazing professors, both of whom have years of experience in Computer Science. As a potential CS Concentrator, I can’t imagine having a better start to my education. But, hey, it’s Harvard, am I right?

For the seminar, we’ve had to read the book Where the Wizard’s Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hefner and Matthew Lyon. This book explores the history of the internet, starting with the room-sized computers with batch processing and moving across time to now. While Al Gore may have (unintentionally) claimed to have invented the internet in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, the book compares the creation of the internet to the construction of a medieval cathedral: everyone puts down a few bricks and anyone can claim credit for putting down the most important bricks, but ultimately it’s a slow process driven by motivated people.

That’s exactly what the ARPAnet was: a system slowly designed and built by individuals and teams who were passionate about their work. First commissioned by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), the ARPAnet was the original “internet”, as a network of computers around the nation. The idea was to have a real-time, reliable, and efficient system of connecting computers across the nation. While this seems like a natural step in the evolution of computers, it, in fact, took a lot of convincing.

At the 1967 meeting called by Bob Taylor, Director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), in Ann Arbor, scientists viewed a national network of computers as frivolous and unnecessary. The biggest issue on their mind was the idea that all the processing for the network would be conducted on the host’s computer. This meant that the already limited processing power would be eaten into. That’s when Wes Clark, from Washington University who didn’t even really like the idea of a network, realized that a sub-network could be created that would be dedicated to routing. This idea took off. And, at the next symposium in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the idea of a network began to gather enthusiasm. Small steps, such as this one, slowly built up to the development of the ARPAnet, and the eventual contracting of the system to Bolt Beranek and Newman.

This process was driven by a few key individuals in particular. Bob Taylor was one of the leaders in managing the creation of ARPAnet. He was the first to pitch it to Herzfeld, who headed ARPA, and hired all the key players. He wanted to increase efficiency, bring down costs, and, simply, do something cool.

Joseph Licklider, a former Harvard professor, pioneered the idea that humans and computers would be at a point of intersection, with close interactions and a sort of “symbiosis”. He also led much of the development and recruitment of the team that ultimately put together the ARPAnet.

Donald Davies and Paul Baran, a Brit and American respectively, coincidentally produced the same sort of work: the idea of packet-switching. Packet-switching allowed for information to be essentially broken up and reassembled Ikea-style down a network. This increases efficiency both in costs and in usage of cables; cables don’t have to be held open for the information. While both hit several roadblocks in the implementation of their ideas, their research revolutionized networking and routing.

The development of the internet is characterized by a lot of people putting together a lot of small parts of a giant puzzle. In fact, this sort of mimics the culture of the internet today with crowd-sourcing and the burgeoning sharing economy. It’s fascinating to see how organically the internet was constructed, less as a product that was to be perfected and sold, and more as an ongoing, developing system that keeps growing and improving.