The Control of Technology by Nation State: Past, Present and Future: The Case of Cryptology and Information Security

摘要

Since the end of WWII, strong controls have been enforced to prevent the spread of military-grade technology or dual use technologies and, since the end of the seventies, especially of Information Security science. The rises of the Internet phenomenon as well as the rise of terrorism make this control even stronger yet more subtle. Contrary to the common belief, the freedom of technology and science is just an illusion. Recently the emerging hacker phenomenon has upset and thwarted this balance between the need of freedom and the need of State security requirements. The main issue lies in the fact that these controls originally focus on homeland and international security purposes (e.g. protection against terrorism or mafia activities). But the fall of the iron curtain and of the Soviet block has dramatically changed the rules of the game. The enforced controls aim at first organizing an economic dominance of a very few Nation States (e.g. G-8 countries) whose real intent is to organize the strategic dominance over the ever-growing technological societies. As an example (among many others), we could mention the case of Cisco vs Huawei/ZTE companies. Based on his own military experience and on his academic work, we are going to explain how this control has been and is organized and will explain the role of the four major actors: Nation State, Industry, Academics and Hackers. We will take the domain of cryptography and of network equipment as illustrating cases.