Makers and Breakers

This image was selected as a picture of the week on the Farsi Wikipedia for the 13th week, 2011. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

FLIP through any newspaper and go from the foreign news to the business pages and what you’ll see is the “other” great geopolitical struggle in the world today. It’s not the traditional one between nation states on land. It’s the struggle between “makers” and “breakers” on the Internet.

This is a great time to be a maker, an innovator, a starter-upper. Thanks to the Internet, you can raise capital, sell goods or services and discover collaborators and customers globally more easily than ever. This is a great time to make things. But it is also a great time to break things, thanks to the Internet. If you want to break something or someone, or break into somewhere that is encrypted, and collaborate with other bad guys, you can recruit and operate today with less money, greater ease and greater reach than ever before. This is a great time to be a breaker. That’s why the balance of power between makers and breakers will shape our world every bit as much as the one between America, Russia and China.

Consider what Robert Hannigan, the director of GCHQ, Britain’s version of our National Security Agency, wrote last week in The Financial Times: The Islamic State, or ISIS, was “the first terrorist group whose members have grown up on the Internet.” As a result, “they are exploiting the power of the web to create a jihadi threat with near-global reach.” And, the simple fact is, he said, “messaging and social media services such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp … have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists.” ISIS has used them to recruit, coordinate and inspire thousands of Islamists from around the world to join its fight to break Iraq and Syria.

Hannigan called for a “new deal” between intelligence agencies and the social networks so the companies don’t encrypt their data services in ways that make breakers like ISIS more powerful and difficult to track.

This will be an important debate, because this same free, open command and control system is enabling the makers to collaborate like never before, too. Here in Cleveland, I met two Israeli “makers” whose company relies heavily on Ukrainian software engineers. Their 11-year-old, 550-person company with employees in 20 countries, TOA Technologies, is a provider of cloud-based software that helps firms coordinate and manage mobile employees. It was just sold in a multimillion-dollar deal. Since I don’t know a lot of Israelis in Cleveland who employ code writers in Kharkiv, Ukraine, to service Brazil, I interviewed them.

Read more . . .