SYMI 2017 July 2-6 | Elounda- Crete

CYBER-CHALLENGES FOR PEACE, DEMOCRACY, COMMUNICATION

Do you believe it is urgent to discuss creatively the challenges and opportunities arising from the digital revolution?

How do algorithms affect our democracies? How do we recognise fake news and propaganda? How can we protect elections from hacking? Should fines and penalties be levied against fake news?

What criteria can we use to evaluate the impact of social media on democracy and civil society? How can new technologies be used in conflict resolution and peace building? How can digital and innovative tools improve the management of humanitarian assistance? Can digitally illiterate decision makers assess the choices that next generation societies will face?

The fifth industrial revolution is underway; do we need a reinvention of the educational system? Is the approach emanating from the World Economic Summit on the fourth Industrial Revolution relevant to address the social impact of new technologies?

Is digital inequality a hindrance for global development?

Should human security become a key parameter in addressing cyber-threats? Do we need a new International Treaty to address cyber-security? Should we recognize cyber-space as a ” global common good”?

These are some of the questions that will be debated in the 2017 Symi Symposium, in a unique informal setting that bring together high ranking politicians, decision makers, top executives from international organizations, policy planners, academics, entrepreneurs, innovators and global creative thinkers.

CYBER- CHALLENGES FOR PEACE, COMMUNICATION, DEMOCRACY

Main sessions – Framework for discussion

 Using innovation to empower humanistic values

Technological revolutions in the digital age are transforming our societies in a way that most institutions cannot follow. As Nick Bostrom mentions in his book “Technological Revolutions : Ethics and Policy in the Dark”, we need to address the unpredictability of their long term impacts, the problematic role of human agency in bringing them about, and the fact that technological revolutions rewrite not only the material conditions of our existence but also reshape culture and even human nature.

One could assume that everyone on the planet, will be involved in one or more technological revolutions: if not as inventor, founder, investor, regulator, or opinion leader, then at least as voting citizen, worker, and consumer. 

Although, these issues were mentioned by some scholars in the last decades, only now do we fully understand the societal impact of the digital revolution.

One approach is the post digital movement, aiming to re-humanize society by re-discovering the quality of what we lost.

Another approach is to humanize the fourth industrial revolution by understanding better the challenges of technological advances and integrating them in a political and social vision. For most thinkers, turning back is not realistic. However, there is an urgent need to assess the positive and negative aspects of new technologies to limit potential harms and identify the right responses.

Cyber- challenges for Peace

According to a discussion paper issued by the Independent Commission on Multilateralism, while the potential use of Information, Communication and Technology (“ICT”) for development, governance, and peace has posed questions about how to govern the Internet, issues related to security”and to cybersecurity in particular have made these questions more urgent. As the barriers to enter in the cyber domain are low, cyberspace includes many and varied actors from criminal hackers to terrorist networks to governments engaged in cyber espionage. Cybercrime and cyberattacks can undermine the safety of Internet users, disrupt economic and commercial activity, and threaten military effectiveness. Moreover, conflict that takes place in the cyber domain often mirrors conflict in the physical world.

New technologies can, however, offer new opportunities for managing conflict and building peace. Participatory data collection and processing tools, can empower communities to resist violence and recover after conflicts. ICT can provide avenues for alternative discourse or community engagement that promote peace. But in peace-building too, these technologies bring risks. Access to new technologies is often uneven and can be manipulated by governments, and users face privacy and security risks. Moreover, the same technologies that could be used to spread messages of peace could also be used to propagate messages of hate.

In warfare, technology can theoretically limit casualties and high costs by using for instance armed drones, or killer robots. But as it was underlined in many UN reports, it is crucial to adapt the international law in these new circumstances and ensure that human decision making remains at the heart of lethal actions. Actually we have over twenty autonomous weapon systems already in existence, without a comprehensive legal framework. 

In this context, we should work to recognize cyberspace as “a global common good” and formally recognize that it should be used for “peaceful purposes”.

Cyber- challenges for democracy

Forbes magazine declared that, 2017 will be the year of “cyber warfare” as the world shifts from hard power to soft power, that become cyber power. Until the 2016 US election, cyber security was discussed mainly among defense and intelligence experts, but now it dominates headlines, fuels think tanks, and worries us all. 

Last year we have seen a dramatic rise in cyber crime affecting both public and private sector, worrying cases of election hacking, increasing use of social media for propaganda purposes and blunt cases of misleading information based on parallel facts. Cyber-hacking, a key issue in elections around the world, has been perceived as a method to undermine legitimate political authority by state and non state actors. It is associated also with general efforts of manipulation through social media and sophisticated propaganda. 

These phenomena represent a setback from the previous perception of new technologies as a tool of democratic expression and deliberation. As it is very difficult to identify perpetrators in the broad web complex universe, civil society may become hostage of a grey zone of contradictory values and messages, without adequate legal framework or guarantees of transparency. 

And these tools appear to play into the hands of populists and different kind of extremists, who wish to delegitimize the democratic process, fuel social, national and cultural divides, distort history and spread irrational thinking.

In this context, it becomes crucial to discuss how democracies can address these attacks, without losing their fundamental values.

Cyber-challenges for communication

The decline of traditional media and the professional crisis of journalism hurt the very essence of ethical rules associated with news coverage. 

New technologies, facilitated the rapid spread of news, gave a voice to the most under- represented in big media and enabled real time coverage and global accessibility. But in doing so, amateurs replaced professionals in transmitting the news and personal bias became a key factor in communication. 

Articles and posts without mention of sources are the norm, titles and photos become more important than content, emotions are manipulated, tools for political or corporate interests. 

Social media networks like “Facebook” created comfortable platforms of a limited virtual reality, while at the same time they were successfully used for social mobilization on a number of causes. 

”Fake news” opens the debate for revising the criteria related to the positive or negative potential of “new media”, requiring a number of changes that have to do with legislation, transparency, deontology, education. And above all, it is vital to have informed citizens, with a critical approach, able to make appropriate choices even when technology goes faster than national or transnational rules.