Scenario 6 - Information warfare impact on developing governance and policy modelling
by Karim Hamza, Free University Brussels, Belgium; Dragana Majstorovic, University of Koblenz-Landau
Most of the developed Governments, active in reaping the benefits of technology development in Governance and policy modelling, have discovered the threats of this new approach too. They invest massively to cope with the highly complex decision making systems, dramatic changes in economy, technology and Information Warfare threats plus government’s own changing strategies. This creates challenges with respect to matching decision-making structures and policy modelling. Technologies in policy modelling and governance have more strategic importance for governments and its concepts and tools develop dramatically. This raises the urgencies and importance of protecting government decision making processes like policy modelling from non-solicited disturbing external or internal interferences.
Security is critical to the success of any technological tools used by Governance and policy modelling. Governance and policy modelling tools are more open to interactions with different “stakeholders” Internally (within the boundaries of the state, like pressure groups, political parties, business, citizens ..) or Externally (e.g. other states, multinational businesses, worldwide operating malicious organizations,..) who may influence the decision making process in governance systems; create political pressure or even start a cyber-war, by abusing technological tools used by governance and policy makers. This raises a number of prevention issues to cope with the instability of public decision making processes. This causes increase of the efforts in protecting governance and policy making from being abused by developing a new dimension of “Information Warfare Strategy”, with the aim to build safeguarding tools; and prevent abusing governance systems and policy making process.
The technology of Governance and policy modelling becomes the information backbone which creates a strong relation to strategic information warfare; since both are based on information and the use of technology. In addition, governance information systems contain most of the government’s and community information and become the main war fields in the future. This requires different set of attention; since not all existing warfare techniques are applicable in handling Governance threats, this should include non-military approaches like Policy, diplomatic and laws. In addition to the increasing presence of threats, like: terrorists, competitors, state enemies and malicious organizations make the threat of information warfare important to governments and private sector attached to Governance information systems. It also raises high attention to develop strategic information warfare to protect dimensions such as Military, Physical, Economic, Political, and Social.
This enforces Governments to develop military as well as non-military tools and mechanisms that can protect Governance systems and policy modelling tools. Application domains encompass fields like Political, Legal and Diplomatic. Interactions between agencies inside and outside the government, in addition to international affairs will be needed to define international legal regulations and political channels to control relevant threats. In the end, it will certainly require a (re)definition of the distribution of responsibilities for international legal arrangements in case of legal disputes.
Government develops different tools and techniques to handle such situation; by increasingResearch and Development: by Sponsor research, development, and standard creation in computer network defence, increase the resources devoted to cyber forensics, including the distribution of honeypots to trap rogue code for analysis; Policy: defining policies that deal with different Strategic Information Warfare threats and engage different international parties;Laws: develop clear laws to criminalize action which threat Governance systems and policy modelling tools specially with internal threat; Diplomatic: develop allies networks to discover different joint threats that can impact each other Governance through intelligence and early detections systems; Awareness and Media: create citizen/personal awareness working and dealing with Governance systems and policy modelling tools, on how to protect themselves, how to report violation, be aware of different types of threats and the legal impact of violation.
This leads governance and policy modelling researchers to increase their attention to develop political analysis models that can: assess the condition of the state; evaluate the influence of non-state actors on service provision and security mechanisms inside a society; provide early warning system to organized manipulation of society behaviour through social media and e-participation systems as well as consider other non-Western forms of social organisation, rule-making and conflict resolution models. These analysis models will foster the usage and development of different policy modelling tools like: Social Network Analysis; different simulation tools as: Agent Based Modelling; game theory; multi-agent systems. Additionally, such type of research involvement increases different values to the society and the state, especially from the point of view of security; safety; information systems reliability; privacy protection and assurance of services.