States have lost control of territories and
environments, including the encrypted parts of the internet,
creating a world where no single state has the power to guarantee
its own security.
This is one of the main findings in an interim report,
Shared destinies, published this
morning by the Institute for Public Policy Research's commission
on national security.
Rapid advances in information technologies and biotechnologies
are creating vulnerabilities for national and international
security, according to the report. "Cyber-crime and cyber-terrorism
are already realities," it said.
The report quoted earlier research, saying "the grid of
connections between terrorism and criminal networks has been highly
crisscrossed. The increasing sophistication of both information and
communications technologies and criminal gangs and terrorist groups
themselves makes the scale of the challenge considerable."
The researchers found online fraud and theft rising. "National
governments and global cyber-governing bodies have been overwhelmed
by the ingenuity and pervasive online presence of organised
criminal gangs in recent years," they said.
They said Google had
found 450,000 out of 4.5 million "suspicious" websites were capable
of downloading malicious software. More than two-thirds of programs
were spyware that collected data on banking transactions and sent
it to criminals.
This helped to fuel a financial fraud and money laundering
industry worth as much as $1.5 trilllion, about the size of the
Spanish economy or up to 5% of the world's GDP, they said.
The commission said the report was published against the
backdrop of a significantly worsening international situation. "We
believe we are witnsessing a downgrading of the ability of state
institutions to control the security envirnoment and to provide
public protection," it said.
It said governments now owned less of their critical national
infrastructures. As a result, private sector organisations had
become more important to delivering security and social
resilience.
"Governments cannot take sole responsibility for making people
secure. Governments must devolve, and businesses and individuals
must accept, more responsibility for national security and the
costs will have to be shared," the commission said.