"We don't want a digital 9/11. Unfortunately, the risk is
getting higher," says Andrea Pirotti, executive director of theEuropean Network and Information Security Agency(Enisa).
Pirotti was speaking at the opening a summer school for policy
makers, civil servants and private sector managers on online
privacy and security issues in Europe.
The growing likelihood that a catastrophic failure of the
internet will destroy users' trust is haunting European politicians
and civil servants. They fear that with it will go the dream of an
economically vibrant networked economy.
According to an Enisa document, there is a 10% to 20% chance
that telecom networks will be hit by a major breakdown within the
next 10 years, and that it will cost the world €193bn - roughly
equivalent to the projected UK national debt, thanks to the banking
crisis.
Moreover, European politicians believe the digital economy could
generate up to three million new jobs in the next few years. This
is on top of five million created by the mobile phone industry.
The EU funded the initial research into GSM, the mobile phone's
most successful technical implementation, which now claims more
than 70% of the market.
The European Commission has earmarked €18m to develop GSM's
latest technology,
LTE Advanced, which will permit handsets and other devices to
connect at 1Gbps within four or five years, says Joao da Silva,
director of the European Commission's network and communications
directorate.
LTE Advanced will put mobile communications on a par with or
better than fixed-wire systems for speed. Fixed-wire network
operators will have to install optical fibre links to the home to
stay competitive, he says.
But the foundations are fragile. The failure could come either
from a technical failure or outage, or from a massive breach of
personal privacy, says MEP Jorgo Chatzimarkis.
Consumer trust in the network is essential for the development
of a networked economy, so the resilience of the internet is a
European priority, he says.
This fear drives an EU budget of nearly €1bn for network and
information systems R&D. Much of this is to improve the
internet's defences against intentional attacks or accidental
failures, but even more is to improve the user's experience and
trust in the systems, he says.
The key application areas are to create smarter systems to
enhance living, energy use, transport and health, he says. There
are already many projects that use location and geographic
information to manage these aspects better, he says.
This raises the issue of how much information people are willing
to give up, or that governments believe they need, to fulfil this
ambition.
Privacy is a fundamental human right, says Pirotti. But people
are surprised how much of their lives leave an online "shadow",
says former US National Science Foundation executive Peter
Freeman.
Freeman was an early funder of the research project that turned
into Google, and gave the go-ahead to the NSF's
Geni project, a long-term
project to allow researchers to do large-scale experiments on the
social and technical development of next generation networks.
He is deeply worried that a catastrophic failure or other loss
of confidence in the internet will provoke consumer demand that
governments lock down the internet.
Quoting Harvard's
Robert Zittrain, he says this would kill the element of play
that has created so much wealth via the internet.
"You can never build the technical walls high enough," he
says.
The real issue is changing people's behaviour. "We need the
right legal and social defences against abuse," says Freeman.