Technopolitik

Siliconpolitik: Where Do We Go Now?

— Pranay Kotasthane

I have a follow-up paper for NUS-ISAS discussing the next steps for the Quad Semiconductor Supply Chain initiative. I argue that the Quad Principles Document on Technology Design, Development, Governance and Use is a good reference point for the collaboration on semiconductors.

An initiative to map capacity and identify vulnerabilities is a welcome first step. However, a lot more needs to be done to create a secure, resilient semiconductor supply chain. Another vital document released on 24th September — the Quad Principles on Technology Design, Development, Governance, and Use document — serves as a helpful guide for realising the ultimate goal. This section maps key principles in the document to potential initiatives in the semiconductor domain.

One, the document on principles argues that resilient, diverse, and secure technology supply chains are vital to the shared national interests of the Quad countries. To achieve this goal, the document advocates "close cooperation on supply chains with allies and partners who share our values” since this “will enhance our security and prosperity, and strengthen our capacity to respond to international disasters and emergencies."

A way to map this principle to the semiconductor domain would be to form a Quad semiconductor consortium that manages a jointly held Quad Supply Chain Resilience Fund. This consortium can then create a roadmap for new semiconductor manufacturing facilities across the Quad countries. The goal should be to ensure redundancy in the ecosystem such that this supply chain is not susceptible to geopolitical or geographic risks. For instance, while the US focuses on restarting manufacturing at leading-edge nodes (5 nanometres and below), the consortium could work together to build specialised analog, memory foundries operating at trailing-edge nodes (45nm and above) in India, Japan, or Australia.

Another way to realise this principle is for the consortium to create one centre for excellence (CoE) in each Quad country in an area of its immediate interest. For example, Australia could host the CoE for new materials in electronics, Japan could host the CoE for silicon manufacturing equipment, while the US and India could host CoEs on fabless design architectures.

Two, the principles document recognises the importance of "international standards development that foster interoperability, compatibility, and inclusiveness." This principle can translate into cooperation on developing new standards for open-standard instruction set architectures such as RISC-V and for manufacturing on semiconductor composites such as Gallium Nitride.

Three, the principles document underscores that the Quad countries are "committed to facilitating the exchange of researchers and movement of highly skilled personnel to enhance science and technology collaboration". This applies well to semiconductor R&D cooperation, where governments can do a lot to foster technology exchange, visitation and research participation, and joint development between companies in the Quad countries. For instance, lowering employment barriers for semiconductor professionals in the Quad countries could facilitate more joint development. Beyond skilled personnel movement, lowering investment barriers and export controls within the Quad bubble can facilitate more cross-licensing arrangements.

Further, I identify three key factors that could determine how far this initiative goes:

One, the US needs to review its approach to technology protection in the semiconductor domain. Given that US-headquartered companies alone account for 62 per cent of global fabless firm revenues and 51 per cent of global integrated design manufacturers (IDM) revenues, the US role in creating a resilient supply chain is critical.

In the past, the US government adopted strict trade and regulatory mechanisms restricting technology transfer. This restrictive approach needs to give way to a collaborative mode in the Quad. In a paper titled "An Allied Approach to Semiconductor Leadership", Stephen Ezell lists some measures that the US could take. These include enrolling partner countries in trusted foundries programmes, co-investing in semiconductor moonshots, reducing export controls, lowering foreign investment screening barriers with like-minded countries, and sharing information on intellectual property theft. Just as the US is now willing to share critical technologies with partners through the AUKUS defence arrangement, an allied approach should be adopted in the semiconductor domain.

Two, all four Quad countries need to work to increase trust in each other's legal enforcement mechanisms. The four members need to harmonise their contract enforcement, regulatory practices, and patent protection mechanisms. Such measures will encourage companies to collaborate across borders.

Three, the Semiconductor Supply Chain Initiative should become a platform that coalesces other powers in this domain, such as Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, Singapore, and the European Union (EU). The larger the grouping of like-minded countries, the more resilient and secure the semiconductor supply chain is likely to be.

What do you think?

Antriksh Matters #1:Lab On A Chip for Space Missions

— Ruturaj Gowaikar

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have jointly prepared a device to conduct cell biology-based experiments in space. The device, called MANAS, Sanskrit for Mind  stands for Microbial Analysis in Space. It  is a technology demonstrator and uses the lab-on-a-chip (LOC) concept. The details of this device were published in the Journal Acta Astronautica.

Cell-biology experiments in space

Microgravity, as experienced in space, be it in low earth orbit (LEO) or outer space, can affect various cell processes at the cellular and subcellular level. These effects can vary from alteration to the cytoskeleton and shape of a cell, to alteration in the metabolism of cells. The effect of this is that pathogenic microbes might behave differently in space and insight into their growth dynamics can have a bearing on the health of personnel involved in manned-space missions. Altered growth rates  also affect microbial output of space bioreactors being developed for manned missions. The aim of these bioreactors is to produce protein-based medicines, help in recycling water on-board etc.  in order to reduce frequency of re-supply missions. India’s manned space mission- Gaganyaan – is underway and platforms like MANAS are useful to conduct preparatory experiments for future missioClonger durations.

Design of MANAS

MANAS is a milli-fluidic device that was fabricated using 3D printing while some components were CNC machined. It consists of a cylindrical cavity in an aluminum block called the bacterial chamber and some smaller antechambers. It is surrounded by optically transparent material (PMMA) plates. This allows the LED and photo-diode sensors to measure optical cell density-the standard way to count cells using principles of spectroscopy. It has a modular design so multiple such chambers can be housed together to form cassettes designed specifically to conduct one experiment. Such multiple cassettes can also be loaded as cartridges to perform different experiments. The device has a microcontroller to initiate the experiment remotely, measure the optical density (OD), and store data on-board.

MANAS was tested using the spore forming bacteria Sporosarcina pasteurii. The bacteria were deactivated metabolically by converting them into spores. Spores were then lyophilized and suspended in a sucrose solution and loaded into MANAS, while the nutrient media was kept in a different chamber separated by a NC solenoid. The OD scores were a readout for the growth and were used to prepare growth curves. The growth curves were cross-validated using electron-microscopy. MANAS was tested under vacuum conditions and altered atmospheric conditions as well.

The bacteria chosen is also significant because it is an ureolytic bacteria and thus can prepare calcium carbonate crystals. ISRO research on this bacterium has made it a contender to form space bricks for lunar habitation.

Thus, this self-contained, leak proof, orientation-agnostic, remotely operable LOC platform is one small step in the right direction  for India’s space research programme. The next step is to test it in flight mode and design more complex experiments.

Antriksh Matters #2: Lessons from UK’s National Space Strategy

— Aditya Pareek

The UK has come out with its first ever national space strategy document. The document builds on the UK’s Integrated Review and Defence Command Paper that came out earlier this year and featured space prominently.

The strategy document has several aspects which any similar strategic publication on space by India could also take inspiration from and integrate:

1. A focus on “Whole Ecosystem Approach” for the advancement of the Indian space sector.

2. Focus on procurement of dual-use space technologies and platforms for the fulfilment of national space goals - without compromising on the deliverable specs.

3. Focus on making space sustainable by actively contributing to space debris removal, and explore technologies and services that may extend the service life of satellites and other space objects while in orbit.

4. Earmarking a venture capital fund for private finance access to New Space sector companies - along the lines of UK’s Seraphim Space Investment Trust.

5. Acknowledge the operating environment vis a vis adversarial counterspace capabilities and include a back-of-the-envelope estimate for potential damage they can inflict on Indian economy.

Check out the All Things Policy Podcast featuring our take on the UK’s national space strategy here.

If the content in this newsletter interests you, consider taking up Takshashila’s short course on Evidence-based policy-making for responding to COVID-19. The course introduces participants to the various public policy aspects of managing recurring COVID-19 waves. Topics will include the role of the government, tackling misinformation, ethical decision-making during a pandemic, and the adoption of emerging technologies to fight the pandemic. You can register yourself for this course on or before 21st October 2021. To know more, click here.

Yogakshema: An US-EU Tech Partnership in the Making

— Arjun Gargeyas

Officials from both the European Union (EU) and United States (US) met in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks back for the first-ever meeting of the “EU-US Trade and Technology Council” (TTC). This comes on the back of the Quad summit, where technology played an important role in the discussions, especially in outlining the main objectives of the ‘Critical and Emerging Technologies Working Group’ by the alliance. It is also following the declaration of the AUKUS pact, with the US and UK signing agreements to transfer nuclear submarine technology to Australia. 

The rise of China and its influence on the global technology ecosystem through its tech giants have made the West, and especially the United States, take a fresh look at mechanisms for regulating and using critical technologies. Despite sharing concerns with regard to China’s technological growth and the global semiconductor chip shortage, the US and EU have very differing views on how to regulate the use of technology. The new EU-US technology council will have a hard time navigating the partnership as it looks to counter China’s tech dominance. 

Trying to Find a Middle Ground

The European Union’s approach to regulating and governing technology has evolved from an individual-centric approach keeping in mind the rights of its citizens. Fundamental rights like privacy have been accorded the greatest importance when it comes to framing laws related to technology. This can be seen from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Act, which addresses data protection and privacy in the European Union along with protecting personal data from being shared outside the EU area. The EU has been willing to intervene when it feels that the rights of European citizens have been infringed upon by any public or private entity. 

The United States, on the other hand, has always followed a minimal regulatory framework on technology. It has stressed how multiple rules and regulations might hamper the growth of emerging technologies. Following a market-driven and hands-off approach to governing technology, the United States has let the private sector and institutions take the lead while providing just minimal responsibilities to the state. 

This makes it necessary for both the actors to arrive at a compromise. But this kind of differential pattern also allows for both to complement each other’s strengths. The partnership can eventually help the EU obtain the geopolitical relevance that the US owns in the field while the US can obtain the rights and freedoms relevance that the EU policies champion. However, this requires political alignment which is yet to be seen between the two. Time will tell whether both will compromise on the principles they follow while regulating technology.

The French Reservation 

While the first summit of the US-EU TTC focused on the ongoing semiconductor shortages, regulation of artificial intelligence technology, and the upholding of competition in tech, reports said that there were some grumblings from a certain EU member regarding the discussions which took place at the summit. French diplomats specifically asked to remove certain clauses and language which referred to a proposed semiconductor supply chain that mentioned the mutual dependency between the US and EU.

France also has differing opinions when it comes to the security of supply aspects with it looking beyond just semiconductor chips as a potential shortage of supply. This has made the French stress on a rather cautious approach towards a potential US-EU partnership, with it emphasising the need to rebuild transatlantic trust.

The French anger over the AUKUS deal seems to have subsided but the overall reservation they hold can put the brakes on the working of the TTC, which looks to take off soon.

What will the focus be on?

The EU comprises over 25 different countries with contrasting views and interests.

Other than the China-centric focus, the EU partnership with the US should be driven by easier access to and dissemination of technology. Foreign investments in each other’s regions and reducing dependencies on global supply chains of critical technologies should be the focus of the TTC. Better collaboration in the research and development field of emerging technologies between technically advanced blocs like the US and EU can eventually act as a counterbalancing measure against the increasing Chinese influence.

The question which remains is, will the US and EU’s common anxieties and fears help to forge a credible working partnership or will the dream of a transatlantic technology group remain just a dream? George W. Bush and Barack Obama, during their time in office, tried bringing the EU to the table for better cooperation on technology but eventually failed. Will the rapid rise of China in the technology space during the past decade possibly provide a new impetus to the partnership?

CyberPolitik : DCNs are trying Regulatory Fixes (Again, and again)

— Sapni G K

Over the past few editions, we have presented our working idea of what a Digital Communications Network is. Commentators across the globe have identified the difficulty in finding adequate regulatory responses to the fissures that appear in our lives that are intertwined with DCNs. We have also warned that regulatory fixes for the troubles of (some may say troubles caused by) DCNs are not easy to find. While policymakers across the globe scratch their heads looking for solutions, these DCNs have suggestions to offer. 

It is not the first time suggestions come from the very platforms that are due for regulation. Such overtures into policymaking have been attempted by every industry that attracted global attention, from telecom to tobacco. The technology industry itself has ventured into designing regulatory solutions. As governments are evidently not keen on this sort of self-regulation to continue, new tactics emerge from the playbooks of tech giants. 

Twitter released a position paper titled “Protecting the open Internet” on 13 October 2021. It outlines five broad guiding principles for the regulation of the internet. In short, it calls for the adoption of universal standards for the internet and its regulation, while adhering to established norms of human rights. It recasts the decades-old vision of a cyber utopia, which has sadly come crumbling down. Trust, competition, and transparency are central to Twitter’s recommendations. It proclaims that this vision would help big and small players alike, and honour the vision of the internet. Such documents or recommendations, called by their myriad titles, have been produced by every tech company and the multitude of people who helm them.

However, things are different in practice. In response to regulatory warnings in Australia, a misinformation oversight committee was created within the Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), an industry body publicly backed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter. This contradicts Twitter’s proclamations for open standards and giving space to smaller players. As India moves ahead in regulating DCNs, this experience gives us two valuable lessons. Firstly, taking the proclamations they make at face value might not be in the best interest of our society or the regulatory regime that we intend to create. Secondly, DCNs should have access to the policymakers’ tables, but it must be as limited as any other stakeholder group such as civil society or law enforcement agencies. Devoting more attention, time and regard may give way to them usurping the process to the possible loss of other stakeholders and industry players. 

Antriksh Matters #3: ISpA a new beginning? 

— Aditya Ramanathan

On 11 October, India’s Prime Minister made a clear indication of the importance the government attaches to India’s commercial space sector. Launching the industry body, the Indian Space Association, the Prime Minister identified four “pillars” of space reform: freedom of innovation for the private sector, the role of the government as an enabler, preparing India’s young workforce for the future, and to see the space sector as a resource for the development of the wider populace. 

The founding members of the Indian Space Association are largely established vendors for ISRO. For instance, last year, Larson & Toubro provided a booster segment for ISRO’s Gaganyaan Launch Vehicle, that is key to India’s human spaceflight programme. Another long-time ISRO vendor is Walchandnagar Industries, which is presently helping to develop solid propellant boosters for the GSLV Mk III launchers. One of the newer companies on the list of founding members is OneWeb, the satellite internet company backed by a consortium of investors led by Bharti Enterprises. During the launch of the Indian Space Association, Bharti Enterprises chairman Sunil Mittal announced that OneWeb would soon become ISRO’s first private Indian customer for satellite launches. 

Other core members of the association include Hughes India, Centum Electronics, state-owned BEL, and Maxar India. 

That the Indian Space Association is dominated by ISRO’s vendors (barring exceptions like OneWeb), is a natural result of the way India’s space sector has evolved for decades, with private players simply acting as suppliers. 

The Indian Space Association will also presumably complement and compete with existing representative bodies like the Satcom Industry Association and Association of Geospatial Industries. Given the Indian Space Association’s backing from industry and the government (it will be headed by Lt. General A.K. Bhat, a decorated officer who retired from service last year), it will not be surprising if it supersedes the existing organisations.

While the Indian Space Association will provide commercial space players a mechanism to both consult each other and approach the government, its success will ultimately depend on the receptiveness of the government. If India is to achieve the vision laid out by the Prime Minister, it will need to move faster. In 2020, it set up the regulatory body INSPACe under the Department of Space. However, it took until September this year to appoint Pawan Goenka, the former managing director of Mahindra & Mahindra as its chairperson. While the appointment of an auto industry stalwart (rather than a government official) was widely welcomed, it took too long, suggesting resistance from within the system. The government must now work to staff up INSPACe and respond quickly to what is reportedly a growing pile of pending applications from private players. More broadly, it provide a fresh set of regulations and policies that will allow India’s space industry to grow from vendors into world-class spacefarers. 

Our Reading Menu

* [Opinion] Robert Reich characterises the Supreme court of USA, Facebook, and the Fed as the horsemen of democracy’s apocalypse drawing a thread of unaccountability from them as wielders of great power. 

* [Book] “On Operations” by Capt. B. A. Friedman USMC Reserve.

* [Book] Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change by Thane Gustafson.

* [Policy Communique] detailing the EU’s Arctic Strategy.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hightechir.substack.com

Siliconpolitik: Mile Sur Mera Tumhaara

— Pranay Kotasthane

High Technology cooperation is fast becoming a differentiating point of the Quad arrangement. It appears that the Quad Working Group, which was formed after the first Summit meeting in March 2021, has locked in space, biotechnology, 5G communications, cybersecurity, and semiconductors as five immediate focus areas. Music to my ears.

As Technopolitik readers are aware, I have been making a case for a Quad collaboration on semiconductors over the last five months. So it was gratifying to find out that, amongst other things, the Quad launched a Semiconductor Supply Chain Initiative to "map capacity, identify vulnerabilities, and bolster supply-chain security for semiconductors and their vital components."

I have a long article in News18 analysing the significance of this announcement. Here are a few excerpts.

Q: What's the big deal about this announcement?

A: Two ways to look at it.

One, the Quad agrees that semiconductors are ‘metacritical’ — in the sense that success in other critical and emerging technologies depends on a secure, resilient, and fast-advancing semiconductor supply chain.

Two:

The summit fact sheet adds that the Quad partners should collectively support a diverse and competitive market for producing semiconductors. The last sentence is significant—it signals a shift in mindset from national indigenisation to strategic cooperation.

Subsidies, incentives, and tax breaks were the only instruments countries pursued — separately — until now. Semiconductors entering the Quad agenda is a recognition of the fact that no one nation-state can eliminate all bottlenecks in the complex semiconductor supply chain.

To illustrate this point, see the Taiwan Economy Minister’s statement earlier in the week:

“Taiwan alone could not sort out the problem because the supply chain is so complex. The bottleneck in fact is in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, because for a while the factories were all shut down.”

When the country that accounts for nearly 70 per cent of contract chip manufacturing says that it alone cannot de-bottleneck the supply chain, other countries should take note. As I keep saying: strategic cooperation is a necessity, not a choice.

Q: What next. Is this initiative enough?

A:

“Mapping the supply chain vulnerability should only be a first step of the collaboration. The grouping can directly bolster supply chain security in the following ways.

One, Quad can form a consortium aimed at building a diversified semiconductor manufacturing base. The consortium could create a roadmap for new manufacturing facilities across Quad countries. The focus should be to collectively have access to manufacturing at the leading-edge nodes (5 nanometres and below) and critical trailing-edge nodes (45 nanometres and above). The latter will continue to remain workhorses for automotive, communications (5G), and AI.

Two, Quad can sponsor new standard developments such as composite semiconductors and create one centre for excellence (CoE) in each Quad country in an area of its immediate interest. For example, Australia could host the CoE for new materials in electronics, Japan could host the CoE for silicon manufacturing equipment, and the US and India could host CoEs on specific fabless design architectures.

Three, Quad can facilitate strategic alliances between companies in each other’s countries. For example, faster visa processing and lower employment barriers for semiconductor professionals in Quad member countries could facilitate higher technology exchange and joint development levels. Removing technology transfer restrictions could make overseas licensing easier. Easing capital flows in this sector could again foster more joint development projects.”

Q: What's in it for India?

A:

“India should use the Quad collaboration to get a Japanese or American company to manufacture semiconductors in India, even if it’s at a trailing-edge node such as 65 nm. Collaborating with partners would minimise the risk of failures while ensuring India’s core defence and strategic interests are secured.

Moreover, the AUKUS defence alliance has shown that the US is willing to share sensitive technologies with key partners, something it wasn’t amenable to in the past. This new technology alliance mindset should become the norm in Quad as well. India should push for the US to lower investment barriers and reduce export controls.

Apart from IC manufacturing, India should double down on its core strength. In a Takshashila Institution report titled India’s Semiconductor Ecosystem: A SWOT Analysis, we observed that India has an outright advantage in semiconductor design. The next step should be to encourage indigenous intellectual property creation. PM Modi’s meeting with the Qualcomm CEO is vital in this regard. With more multinational companies moving their cutting-edge semiconductor design to Indian offices, the Indian ecosystem will develop organically.”

Well begun is half-done. In the next edition, I’ll have some recommendations for what the Quad can consider to deepen this cooperation on semiconductors.

Cyberpolitik #1: Rus(sia)hing to decisions

— Prateek Waghre

In the last few weeks, there have been two sets of significant developments involving Russia and the Internet:

* After several weeks of sustained pressure from Russian authorities, in mid-September, Google and Apple removed a 'smart voting' app from Alexei Navalny's team just before the elections (Techmeme aggregation of related links)

* As part of its efforts to deal with COVID-19-related misinformation, YouTube took action against two German-language channels operated by Russia Today. Russia threatened to retaliate by blocking YouTube and German media outlets.

These issues represent a microcosm of the myriad issues at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.

In this section, let's look at three of them:

Content Moderation through the stack

Not only did Apple and Google remove the app from the Russian versions of their respective app stores, but they also took actions that had downstream effects. Apple, reportedly, asked Telegram to remove some channels that Navalny's team were using to share information or risk being removed from the App Store. Telegram complied.

These actions are neither new nor exceptional - but what is notable is that they have been praised (de-platforming Alex Jones' Infowars, Parler) or criticised (VPN apps in China, HKMAP.live during the 2019 HK protests) in the past, depending on the context. WSJ’s Facebook Files series also references Apple’s role in Facebook’s response to concerns about human trafficking. This is, of course, not specific to Apple, as a range of companies and services at different levels of the internet stack like AWS, Cloudflare, GoDaddy, etc., have had to make such decisions.

A particularly notable recent example was the case of OnlyFans, where the company announced (and later rolled back) policies that would have banned creators who posted adult content. The move was a result, not of any regulatory pressure or social backlash, but the apparent squeamishness of some firms in the financial services industry in the UK, which would have had an impact on creators around the world.

I've also written about the subject of content moderation through the stack over on MisDisMal-Information (27 - Content Moderation Stack, 36 - Must-Carry Water and Internet Scores and 48 - moderation: stacked and loaded)

Complying with 'local regulation'

In the lead-up to Apple and Google removing the 'smart 'voting' app, they were threatened with fines, made to appear before committees where reports suggest that authorities named specific employees that would be liable for prosecution. A proposed Russian law requires that internet companies with over 500 thousand users in Russia set up a local presence. Similar regulation around the world has earned them the moniker of 'hostage-taking laws' as they open employees up to the risk of retaliation/harassment by state authorities.

The local regulation that led to Apple warning Telegram is believed to be about 'election silence' - which prohibits campaigning during elections. Such laws are not unique to Russia.

Multinational companies operating across jurisdictions have had to 'comply with local regulation.' It was rarely an option until the information age, making it possible to scale across countries without establishing a physical presence. Even in the internet economy, companies that operate physical infrastructure deep into the tech stack often have limited choice. I have some personal experience with this, being part of a team that managed Content Delivery Network operations for China and Russia between 2015 and 2018.

Rapid and Global Scale Decision-making

When YouTube decided to enforce its COVID-related misinformation policies, did it anticipate that channels operated by Russia Today would be swept up by the enforcement action and did it expect threats/retaliation by Russian authorities? In 2021, there is no excuse not to, considering we have witnessed so many instances where technology companies found themselves in situations with geopolitical implications. Yet, we must stop and ask two questions. First, do they have the capacity to make these decisions on a global scale on a near-realtime basis? Second, do we want them to make such choices? Arguably, the order should be reversed, but we have to ask the capacity question in parallel since we're already in a situation where they make such decisions.

As US and allied forces were withdrawing from Afghanistan, sections of the press were heavily critical of social media platforms for continuing to platform Taliban-associated voices. Though, we also do need to take into account that nation-states with significant resources and capacity dedicated to international relations and geopolitics have, even now, yet to make a decision (this, of course, is likely strategic in many cases). But it does leave several open questions for private companies that often rely on nation-states for directionality. In this context, it is worth listening to this Lawfare podcast episode which draws parallels with the financial services industry and the mechanisms they can rely on to make decisions regarding dealing with banned groups.

Takshashila is doing a Global Outlook Survey covering domains like India’s bilateral and multilateral engagements, national security concerns, economic diplomacy and attitudes towards the use of force. If this sounds interesting, do click-through to participate.

CyberPolitik #2: Thinking (Data) of the Leaks

— Sapni G K

Voluminous reports surrounding data leaks have surfaced in the past two weeks. Facebook prioritising profits over the safety of its platforms has kept users and the US Congress on their toes. Another series of leaked reports dubbed the Pandora Papers allege tax evasion by famous and powerful figures across the globe. The underlying thread running through these investigations is the nature of these exposes – data leaks. These are whistleblower and media-led efforts that broke into the secret vaults of data held dear by few powerful people. The journalistic value of these investigations cannot be undermined. However, the question of data governance mechanisms crops up again.

Data regulation is not settled for good, regardless of the EU GDPR. Although it provides certain consent-focused templates for transparency in the use of data across sectors, there is no apposite global standard for data governance yet. In the absence of any clearly laid down and achievable normative standard, regulation of technology itself will emerge as a challenge in multiple forms. This manifests as multiple problems in platform regulation – where data maximisation leads to the prioritisation of engagement on the platform and consequentially pushing users into rabbit holes of harmful content, faulty algorithmic recommendations, and ultimately platforms that wield more power than many States.

These challenges are now increasingly being acknowledged by States. China’s efforts at regulating its tech titans reflect its intent to ensure that corporations keep towing its line. The recently concluded EU-USA Trade and Technology Council meeting also reiterated the necessity to lay down standards for data governance. This is critical as we develop technology that captures larger troves of data, such as Artificial Intelligence. The joint statement issued by the Council emphasises the need for cooperation in standard-setting, focusing on human rights and democratic values.

Reports that India’s Personal Data Protection Bill will expand its mandate to become an exhaustive data protection legislation are worth consideration here. India’s data governance framework is limited to a few sectoral regulations by the RBI and the SPDI Rules under the IT Act, 2000. While an overhaul of the current regulatory regime is necessary, thinking through nuances with speed and precision is important. India’s pace in this regard may not give us an opportunity for global standard-setting. A well-defined data governance regime is critical as we start large-scale implementation of technology-based solutions that deal with sensitive information such as health data.

Antariksh Matters: The Quad looks to the heavens, with an eye on China

— Aditya Ramanathan

The Quad has taken baby steps towards space cooperation. A fact sheet jointly released by India and the US announced that the Quad had set up a working group on space. The bilateral joint statement also outlined three areas of cooperation: sharing satellite capabilities on “climate-change risks and the sustainable use of oceans and marine resources,” building capacity for space-related activity among other Indo-Pacific states, and consulting on norms and guidelines. 

Sharing data and analysis on climate change makes sense because it is a major threat to states in the Indo-Pacific and is a way of providing public goods to smaller states in the region. The second area of cooperation - capacity building - can also turn the Quad into a major provider of public goods to smaller states in the region, helping them operate their own military, commercial, and scientific satellites, thereby reducing their dependence on China’s space programme. If the Quad actually achieves these goals, its member states might also be able to operate more ground stations from the territory of these states, improving their own space situational awareness (SSA). 

The third area of cooperation mentioned - consulting on norms and guidelines - may sound the most innocuous or non-descript, but it is, in fact, rooted in the strategic considerations that prompted the creation of the Quad in the first place. China’s 2007 kinetic ASAT missile test certainly prompted India’s own test in 2019. The creation of the PLA Strategic Support Force and mounting evidence of China’s counterspace programme have finally prompted Quad states to coordinate their efforts. 

Norms and guidelines are inherent to the challenge of managing strategic competition in space because they can help shape its pace and direction. This is the primary reason that the US is opposed to Sino-Russian proposals for a treaty governing the weaponisation of space. India’s own approach to these proposals has been cautious, but the realities of China’s non-kinetic counterspace capabilities will continue to nudge it into joining the other Quad states in proposing new norms of behaviour in outer space. 

While the joint statement made a brief mention of space situational awareness (SSA), this is likely to become an important part of Quad cooperation. Here, the geographic dispersion of the four Quad states is actually an asset, as it allows Quad states to leverage ground stations across continents and in both hemispheres. 

Finally, we should note something crucial that the joint statement did not cover: the private sector. While stories of interplanetary probes or human spaceflight may dominate the headlines, what matters most are satellites that look back at the Earth, and Earth-based sensors that track satellites in the planet’s celestial littoral. This is the beating heart of commercial space enterprise, and it presents a major opportunity for the Quad to create and expand “bubbles of trust” that allow for the sharing of key space technologies. The Quad working group on space can also function as a mechanism to identify policies that will encourage greater commercial interaction between private space companies in the member states. India could benefit immensely from this, whether by offering satellite construction or launch services, or offering downstream services for image processing and analysis. 

Our Reading Menu

* [Paper] CSET’s From Cold War Sanctions to Weaponized Interdependence is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the history of technopolitik

* [Article] Navigating the tech stack - Joan Donovan

* [Policy Review] Expanding the debate content moderation - Tarletop Gilespie et al

* [Article] How hate speech reveals the invisible politics of internet infrastructure - Suzanne van Geuns and Corinne Cath-Speth.

* [Paper] The Flaws of Policies Requiring Human Oversight of Government Algorithms by Ben Green

* [Article] The Largest Autocracy on Earth by Adrienne LaFrance

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hightechir.substack.com

Siliconpolitik: Ab Dilli Door Nahin

— Pranay Kotasthane

Readers would've noticed that this newsletter bats for a Quad partnership on semiconductor supply chain security for geopolitical, geoeconomic, and technological reasons.

In edition #5, we proposed what an 'announcement' on semiconductors as an outcome of the upcoming Quad leaders-level summit meeting, could look like. We wrote:

One, announce a Quad Semiconductor Supply Chain Resilience Fund. Think of this as a multi-sovereign wealth fund but for semiconductor investments across the Quad countries. This fund could focus on two areas:

* create a roadmap for new manufacturing facilities across the Quad countries. One of the focus areas should be to secure supplies not just at the leading-edge nodes but also at key trailing-edge nodes, which will continue to remain workhorses for automotive, communications (5G), and AI.

* Sponsor new standard developments such as composite semiconductors and create one centre for excellence in each Quad country in an area of its immediate interest. For example, Australia could host the CoE for new materials in electronics, Japan could host the CoE for silicon manufacturing equipment, while the US and India could host CoEs on specific fabless design architectures.

Two, and this one is an even more ambitious goal, facilitate strategic alliances between companies in the four quad states.

So, we were glad to read Asia Nikkei's report claiming that a draft joint statement of the Quad summit seems to have identified semiconductors and 5G as two areas for technology collaboration.

From an Indian national interest perspective, this collaboration should be used to get a semiconductor fab up and running, although at a matured node such as 65 nm. This move would minimise the risk of failures while ensuring India's core defence and strategic interests are secured.

The AUKUS defence alliance has shown that the US is willing to share sensitive technologies with key partners, something it wasn't amenable to in the past. This new technology alliance mindset should become the norm in the Quad as well. India should push for the US to lower investment barriers and reduce export controls so that companies such as a rejuvenated Intel can consider setting up mature-node fabs in India, Japan, or Australia. The geopolitical timing couldn't have been better.

We're keeping an eye on the Quad Summit. There will be another edition discussing the specific announcements on technology collaboration.

Meanwhile, for a detailed take on a Quad partnership on semiconductors, read my paper here.

If you are looking for a primer on semiconductor geopolitics, here's a recording of a session I participated in, for Ahmedabad University.

Antriksh Matters #1: Where’s India’s Space Doctrine?

- Aditya Ramanathan

In the last few years, India has set up a tri-services Defence Space Agency to manage its military space capabilities. It has greenlighted the setting up of a Defence Space Research Agency that is to be “entrusted with the task of creating space warfare weapon systems and technologies". It has also engaged in dialogue with the US, Japan, and France on space security and has sought to increase its space situational awareness (SSA) capabilities, which are crucial to ensuring the safety of space-based assets. 

While these efforts are modest, they are likely to expand in the near future. What remains to be developed (at least in the public domain) is a doctrine that lays down the rationale for military space capabilities, and provides signposts for those crafting strategy or planning acquisitions. 

We at Takshashila took inspiration from India’s 1999 Draft Nuclear Doctrine, and put together a succinct, five-page  “A Space Doctrine for India”, following many hours of debate and discussion. 

The doctrine, as we envisaged it, would be anchored in deterrence but would be flexible enough to keep India’s options open. The key objective would be to preserve India’s use of space. India’s space forces, which are meant to protect its use of space would be:

* Versatile, encompassing a range of Earth and space-based non-kinetic and kinetic capabilities. 

* Vigilant, providing early warning of imminent attacks or identifying and attributing attacks already underway, whether during peacetime, crisis or conflict.

* Effective at taking defensive and offensive countermeasures against imminent or ongoing attacks on Indian space assets or forces.

India’s terrestrial forces would also form a key component of the space doctrine since they would need to be capable of functioning in a space-degraded environment. They would also have to train to perform in such conditions and develop terrestrial back-ups for space-based capabilities that are vulnerable to enemy attack. 

Our doctrine also laid out the role of command and control, and India’s objectives in pursuing arms control agreements or restraint regimes. 

In a separate document, Space as a Geopolitical Environment, we sought to make explicit the assumptions that had gone into the making of the doctrine. Drawing on our discussions, as well as the works of scholars such as Bleddyn Bowen and John J. Klein, we brought it down to ten points:

1. The geography of space is determined primarily by gravitational forces and radiation. 

2. Space is a distinct environment. The character of orbital space fundamentally differs from that of Earth’s stratosphere, troposphere, and so-called ‘near space’. Therefore, space power cannot be extrapolated from the military term ‘air power’.

3. Human activity in orbital space is shaped by the interaction between activities on Earth and the physical character of the celestial littoral, as defined by such phenomena as orbital mechanics and solar weather patterns.

4. Human activity in orbital space is heavily Earth-centric, with most orbital craft tasked with providing remote-sensing, communications, and navigation services on Earth.

5. Space power is the ability of a state to leverage its space-related activities to wield influence in international politics. It encompasses commercial, military and scientific activity in space, as well as all Earth-based activities connected to the use of space.

6. Celestial lines of communication (CLOCs) are the routes used for space-related activities, including orbital paths and communications links between satellites and Earth.

7. The command of space is the ability to use space, deny it to others, or to do both.

8. Space warfare is waged for the command of space. It can be waged both in space and on Earth.

9.  Orbital space has always been militarised, but new technologies and the diffusion of existing technologies will make it easier to contest the use of space in the near future.

10. The battlefield of space is characterised by vast distances, the lack of natural cover and concealment, the absence of atmospheric attenuation, the presence of radiation, and the mechanics of gravitation.

If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider taking our special credit courses in Ethical Reasoning in Public Policy and Evidence-based policy-making for responding to COVID-19

Cyberpolitik:(un)Safe Harbour 

- Sapni G K

The past couple of days have seen a lot of high-profile media coverage of Facebook. A few of them stand out for their arbitrariness in decision-making. The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook favoured profitability over a finding that Instagram causes body dysmorphia in one out of five teenage girls who are users of the app. Another report suggests that Facebook followed a differential treatment for select users, not taking down content that was otherwise in violation of its community standards. 

Such reports of devious practices add to the bid against safe harbour protection given to social media platforms that host user-generated content. Governments across the globe use these incidents to justify restrictive and harmful mandates on speech on these platforms. The Brazilian Supreme Court and Congress acted steadfastly against a recent ban on the removal of election-related disinformation promulgated by the Bolsonaro Government. The US state of Texas also passed a law preventing content-takedown to “protect the freedoms of conservative users." China’s recent recommendation algorithm regulations, which we covered in the previous edition, also undermine safe harbour protections in the interest of toeing the line drawn by those in power. 

Safe harbour provisions have been the backbone of the development of social media platforms. They protect social media platforms from liability for user-generated content. They catalysed a new wave of ideas around the governance of these particularly positioned privately-owned public spaces. The provisions opened up new avenues for governance such as large-scale pre-legislative policy consultations.

Cyberspace - particularly the internet public sphere created by social media platforms - acted as soft power tools for countries. Russian content farms arguably meddled with the elections in the USA. However, social media popularised K-Pop culture, as it was exported across the globe giving South Korea a niche area of cultural dominance. More broadly, social media platforms also contributed to the rise of new identities.

Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace might be an unachievable utopia today, but social media contributed massively to a stronger sense of community in people located wide and far. Politically motivated actors maliciously meddling with safe harbour protections will not augur well for the future of cyberspace that is already inching closer to a splinternet. The shifting narratives can cause changes in the undercurrents of power in the frontier of cyberspace. 

Techpolitik: After-effects of Nokia Suspending O-RAN Alliance Participation

- Arjun Gargeyas

In 2018, a group of telecommunication firms and network operators came together to improve the coverage of radio access networks (RANs) across the globe. A proposal to transition into virtualized network elements and open interfaces to the RAN was the idea behind improving global connectivity systems through radio communications. 

The O-RAN Alliance was conceived in the hope of providing a better platform and enhancing opportunities for small and medium-scale firms in the communications domain. This includes networking software, hardware supply and cloud computing firms collaborating to create an open and programmable RAN solution that can be deployed. Other O-RAN Alliance initiatives have focused on incorporating artificial intelligence (AI), specifying interfaces and APIs to drive appropriate standardization, and establishing the supply chain infrastructure. 

The organisation is involved in defining and creating specifications for open interfaces and functions used in open radio access network architecture. Currently, the group has a total of 29 operators including telecommunication giants like AT&T and China Mobile. O-RAN specifications adhere to specific standards such as the ones created by global standard-setting bodies like 3GPP for 4G and 5G standards.

Founding operator members include AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo and Orange. The O-RAN ecosystem allows for newer and smaller entrants focused on specific interoperable solutions for 4G and 5G to be included in the system. This mainly allows for mixing and matching different hardware and software solutions created by multiple vendors. 

Nokia, one of the earliest champions of the O-RAN alliance, recently announced their temporary suspension of work on the O-RAN system. This was in response to the US government taking cognizance of Chinese firms’ activities and blacklisting them. A number of restrictions were placed on some of the Chinese vendors, part of the alliance, by the US authorities citing threats to national security.

Nokia officials mentioned that the smooth functioning of the alliance needs the support of Chinese vendors, who form a fifth of all the members of the alliance. Some of these Chinese companies, which are part of the O-RAN alliance, were added to the Entity List of the US, which serves as the list of all blacklisted companies in the country. Nokia has categorically said that these firms hold considerable clout in the industry and cannot be ignored. 

This has put the objective of the O-RAN alliance becoming the next global standard for communications operations in a limbo. It is not known if Nokia will eventually pull out of the alliance or continue to work without the involvement of blacklisted Chinese firms. 

This can also mean that there might be parallel development of O-RAN technology both by the alliance and other Chinese firms, which goes against the tenet of the technology being an international standard facilitating interoperability between different vendors. Some operators and vendors are pushing ahead on Open RAN irrespective of the status of activities at the O-RAN Alliance.

Heads of technology companies believe that if the O-RAN alliance is accorded the status of an international standards body, which has a considerable global reach, then the frictions between the members of the alliance and a single government will not result in the breakdown of the entire group. The whole point of the O-RAN alliance is to break the oligopolistic telecommunications market by providing opportunities for smaller firms to succeed in this space. Political nitpicking is going to derail that effort and ensure that dependencies still exist. 

Antriksh Matters #2: Russia Seeks a Favourable Anti-counter Space Future

- Aditya Pareek

Weaponisation in space is a major concern that has become increasingly important to the global arms control discourse. The advantages of basing weapons systems in space are hardly lost on major world powers. The same also goes for their anxieties about similar capabilities wielded by adversaries.

Russia has been curiously signing joint statements on the non-placement of first weapons in space (NPOK) with countries that don’t have any counter space capabilities. According to this BBC Russian Service report, which also has a nice rundown of the matter, Russia has signed such agreements with 

“Venezuela, Cambodia, Togo, Uruguay, Burundi and a dozen other countries”. 

While this Kommersant report mentions that Russia has

“accumulated 25 such interstate joint statements. And there is also a multilateral one - within the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO)”

According to this brief on the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, which makes it clear that, although closely related to similar multilateral initiatives introduced via the Conference on Disarmament, NPOK is a unilateral Russian initiative. 

As the Kommersant article argues, the pragmatic purpose of signing these agreements is to have leverage in multilateral fora where Russia can count on the signatory nations’ support on counter space and anti-counter space agreements that may address its concerns and keep its shared interests with these nations in mind.

Our Reading Menu

* [Research Article] The capricious relationship between technology and democracy: Analyzing public policy discussions in the UK and US by Bridget Barrett, Katharine Dommett and Daniel Kreis

* [Facebook Files] An investigation by the Wall Street Journal 

* [Book] The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business

* [Commentary] Geopolitics and Technology – US‑China Competition: The Coming Decoupling?

* [Book] Undersea Geopolitics: Sealab, Science, and the Cold WarBook by Rachael Squire

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hightechir.substack.com

Antriksh Matters: Is Space the Ultimate High Ground?

— Aditya Ramanathan

Several of the world's major powers have devoted hard cash and organisational resources to defend their interests in space. Most prominently of the new institutions created is the US Space Force, but its most notable counterpart is the PLA Strategic Support Force (SSF) in China. Even India has created a far more modest Defence Space Agency, though it is hardly comparable to the American and Chinese organisations. 

While these new institutions have come up, the development of theories of space power is still a work in progress. In 1996, the strategic thinker Colin S. Gray, asked: "Where is the Mahan for the final frontier?" In the quarter-century since, there have been several notable efforts at developing a useful body of theories on space power. 

Yet despite the growing body of sophisticated literature, all too many observers and practitioners continue to simply define space as the “ultimate high ground” or simply as “high ground”.  Even in India, it’s common to see articles on space power that have titles like “Seizing the Ultimate High Ground” or that  warn readers that “space is becoming the new military high ground that countries want to seize and dominate.”

Much of this thinking about the “ultimate high ground” seems to originate from the US, and more specifically, the US Air Force. Its senior officers have cited the idea for decades, and it has remained an organising principle for thinking about space. Even the newly minted Space Force has imported the notion of "high ground" uncritically. As its official 2020 doctrine makes clear:

“The value of high ground is one of the oldest and most enduring tenets of warfare. Holding the high ground offers an elevated and unobscured field of view over the battlefield, providing early warning of enemy activity and protecting fielded forces from a surprise attack. Furthermore, forces on elevated terrain hold a distinct energy advantage, increasing the efficiency and longevity of military operations. Finally, control of the high ground can serve as an effective obstacle to an opponent’s military, diluting combat power by forcing the enemy to dedicate time and resources away from the main effort in order to dislodge an entrenched force.”

The doctrine is making three propositions. The first of these is that space helps provide early warning and reduces the risk of surprise. This is self-explanatory and hard to contest. It is the remaining two propositions that are more problematic. There is no doubt that “elevated terrain” and “entrenched forces” can confer major advantages in land warfare. But do these apply to space? In a Takshashila discussion document we recently published, Aditya Pareek and I consider the vulnerability of satellites in Earth’s orbital space or “celestial littoral” and argue against the “high ground proposition”:

“There is no question that space is an unmatched vantage point from which to observe the earth. However, the celestial littoral lacks the other attributes commonly associated with “high ground” on land. Orbital space offers no natural protection from enemy observation and attack. A satellite cannot “dig in”. This means orbital craft do not enjoy natural cover (some protection from enemy fire) or concealment (protection from enemy observation, but not necessarily enemy fire). In short, satellites in low earth orbit are vulnerable to any adversary with adequate space situational awareness (SSA) and some offensive capabilities. Satellites can only achieve a form of concealment by deceiving adversaries into believing they are something else—a purely commercial craft or a piece of debris—or by being too small to detect, which usually means less than 10 centimetres in size.”

Besides deception and miniaturisation, satellites can also park themselves out of range. For example, geosynchronous satellites, which orbit the Earth at an altitude of nearly 36,000 kilometres, cannot be reached by most existing ASAT missiles. However, every orbit involves trade-offs of its own, and emerging capabilities in electronic warfare and directed energy weapons (DEWs) could reduce the advantage of distance in space warfare. 

Rather than persist with the popular “high ground” idea, we can turn to conceptions of airpower and maritime power for more useful points of departure when thinking about space. More broadly, any conception of space power cannot be purely military, not even when discussed in a military doctrine document. Seen as a source of comprehensive national power, space power encompasses commercial, military and scientific activity in space, as well as all Earth-based activities connected to the use of space. In our document, we define space power as “the ability of a state to leverage its space-related activities to wield influence in international politics.”

Strangely enough, the idea of “ultimate high ground” actually understates the importance of space and gets its most basic characteristics wrong. It’s time to recognise the idea is as vacuous as the deepest reaches of interstellar space. 

You can find our discussion document, here

Infopolitik: Open Source Intelligence & India

— Pranay Kotasthane

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is having its moment in the sun. DRASTIC's work on the origin of COVID-19 highlighted not just how amateurs can expose the blind spots of government intelligence agencies, but also how OSINT could demolish widely established narratives. Then in June 2021, Decker Eveleth, brought to light China's new missile silos, using just commercial satellite imagery.

In addition, an OSINT pioneer Bellingcat was out with a book while The Economist described OSINT as one of the bright sides of the Information Age. Earlier this year, CSIS's (An American think-tank) Technology and Intelligence Task Force recommended that OSINT be elevated as a core "INTs" — at the same level as GEOINT, HUMINT, and SIGINT, complete with a separate intelligence agency of its own.

So, this article is my first-cut attempt to understand the promise of OSINT from an Indian perspective.

Let's begin with the three functions of intelligence work and try to see where OSINT fits in each of them.

* Collection. OSINT technically refers to a collection discipline. It refers to using publicly available information once the requirements are specified by the intelligence community's customers. With satellite images being available easily and people leaving vast amounts of digital footprints, OSINT offers a lot of promise as a means of collection.

However, what blocks its wider adoption in a government intelligence agency is precisely that it’s publicly available. Mark Lowenthal, an authority on this subject, writes that intelligence agencies share the assumption is that the more secret the information, the more valuable it is. So OSINT is seen as useless by default. Adopting OSINT then becomes a much tougher behavioural problem rather than a technical one.

* Analysis. This step involves generating insights and recommendations based on information collected by one or more sources. Like with the collection step, the information provided by OSINT is likely to be given less importance over data collected by other 'secret' sources.

* Operations. In this step, OSINT could be used to expose the adversary's plans or actions with the aim of either discrediting or causing a domestic upheaval in the target country. More realistically, this could be done to weaken the negotiating position of an adversary. But if such an OSINT operation is traced back to the attacking country's government, it faces the risk of being devalued as a disinformation exercise.

Taken together, it does seem that OSINT’s importance will only increase in the Information Age. It also becomes apparent that the OSINT modus operandi differs in fundamental ways from that of traditional intelligence agencies.

Given this paradox, how can India leverage OSINT for its benefit?

In the Indian setup, keeping OSINT distinct from traditional intelligence agencies seems to be a better idea for both. The rigid structures in the old-world agencies might continue to glorify secretly obtained information, relegating OSINT permanently to the sidelines. On the other hand, a stand-alone, non-classified entity whose findings other agencies can choose to use in their analysis might be more acceptable. A third way is to eschew government linkages with private OSINT organisations and instead focus on presenting a united front to the adversary. The flowers of OSINT might well bloom on the fertile soil of social trust.

Takshashila is doing a Global Outlook Survey covering domains like India’s bilateral and multilateral engagements, national security concerns, economic diplomacy and attitudes towards the use of force. If this sounds interesting, do click-through to participate.

Cyberpolitik #1: China's first move

-Sapni G K

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released the draft "Internet Information Service Algorithmic Recommendation Management Provisions" for public comments on 26 August 2021. Algorithms and data are the fundamental blocks of our increasingly technology-mediated economies. This is one of the first concrete endeavours across the globe to regulate algorithms, positioning algorithm regulation as process or mechanism regulation rather than mere input/output based regulation. Once passed, China can claim to be the first State across the globe to institutionalise algorithm audits at scale.  

China’s legal system is undergoing an overhaul to ensure adequate regulation of market players in a technology-mediated society; ranging from antitrust reforms to labour reforms. A common thread runs through these regulations, shifting China's narrative from creating wealth to equitable distribution of wealth and holistically improving the quality of Chinese life.

China is eyeing to be the leader in establishing norms for the 21st century, on its way to being a comparable standard for liberal democracies across the world to emulate. Interestingly, this draft, the Personal Information Protection Law, other recent regulatory and enforcement steps are comparable to the steps taken by the USA and the EU. Read together, it signals that vastly different regimes are eyeing the lowest common denominator in the regulation of the internet.

Clearly, China seems to be racing ahead to achieve the status of a forerunner at regulation of internet-based technologies. There is an attempt at cementing the claims of international legitimacy and trying to win the tripolar contest of regulation.

Regulation of e-commerce with a profound environmental angle has been an EU concern that has been co-opted by the US recently. Similarly, labour rights regulation, particularly in the gig economy, seems to be shifting profoundly towards the welfare model proposed by EU states, but China now takes the lead.

With the draft Algorithms regulation getting finalised, China also steps in to pivot the algorithm regulation towards its model of social equity, which can possibly become a standard as ubiquitous as the GDPR. Effective regulation is a great tool for soft power. China's track record on liberty and freedoms reflects in this draft and does not bode well for liberal democracies. These are developments India should watch closely and analyse cautiously. 

Energypolitik: Photovoltaics – The Next Rare Earths?

-Arjun Gargeyas

With the effects of climate change managing to wreak havoc across the globe (from the wildfires in Australia and California in 2020 to the wildfires in Greece and Turkey in 2021, along with massive flash floods in Germany and China), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its report reaffirmed our worst fears. Attention has turned to the adoption of sustainable and clean energy along with states, both developing and developed, requiring to honour their climate change agreement commitments. This has put photovoltaics (PV) (using solar energy to generate electricity) on the path to becoming one of the most critical and useful technologies for states around the world looking to transition into a majorly renewable energy society. 

The PV sector shares a striking similarity with that of the rare earth industry a decade back, both with its absolute necessity across renewable energy domains and with China establishing a clear lead over all its rivals in terms of meeting the global demand of PV technology (almost 70% along with Taiwan), solar power generation capacity and the solar power generated in a year. The strategic and sustainable angle to PV technology puts it at the forefront of geopolitical competition, similar to what the rare earth industry still faces. Playing a crucial role in the global semiconductor supply chains too, the PV industry has an opportunity to become an area for potential collaboration between like-minded nations to stymie a single state's hegemony and build an alliance for sharing renewable energy technologies. 

Investment 

There has been a consistent increase in investments related to renewable and sustainable energy across the world in the last decade. Solar energy and its benefits have long been discussed and pushed forward, but the sector has yet to take off in the developing countries as it is a long, drawn-out process with the need for a consistent influx of money and natural resources. States with additional funding can effectively create a robust supply chain of PV devices with the help of the comparative advantages of the 'sunshine countries', which have abundant solar capacity and the technologically advanced states that can build devices to harness this raw energy into electricity. 

Critical Materials Supply Chains

PV technology has a number of critical materials that are required for the manufacturing process. Here is where multilateral forums and groupings, especially the Quad in the Indo-Pacific, can come together on emerging technology such as Photovoltaics to reduce the risks of any bottlenecks in the global supply chains of PV materials. The crystalline Silicon (cSi) technology has dominated the PV technology all these years with the copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) technology slowly gaining importance in recent times. China absolutely rules the world in terms of Silicon production outpacing rivals consistently. But the up-and-coming CIGS technology utilizes Gallium and Indium for which Australia is one of the world's leading reserves. In terms of solar panel manufacturers across the world, China occupies 7 to 8 slots out of the top 10 in terms of shipments (in GW) due to which the supply chain of solar panels has been concentrated in the hands of the Chinese over a decade and a half. 

Need for Co-operation

There is always a need to ensure better co-operation between states which can be done by creating interdependencies among them. One of the ways to do that in the renewable energy sector, especially the solar power sector is to build transboundary electric grids which can result in the distribution of PV technology. The creation of smaller grids, such as microgrids, across borders, can help in significant transfer of technology between the developed and developing countries along with utilizing the resources that the other states have to offer. This can also result in the increase of cross border energy trade and can help each country achieve its demand if they are falling short of meeting their own demands. Greater electric interconnections between the states can result in widespread access to PV technology across the world.

There is almost a global consensus on the threat of climate change and the need for the reduction in fossil fuel dependencies. The international treaties signed by these nations have clearly outlined the path to transition into a sustainable energy-based society with solar energy at the forefront of it. Photovoltaics, as a sector and its technology, has already shown how necessary it can be in the coming decades. With all countries requiring to honour their commitments to global agreements on climate change and sustainable energy, the PV sector will soon be of immense strategic concern, and each state must ensure its presence and influence in the Photovoltaics industry to protect its own interests and prevent any takeovers of the supply chains of critical technologies.

Cyberpolitik #2: Middleware - middle ground or middle-of-nowhere?

-Prateek Waghre

A recently published paper analysing tweets from Donald Trump’s account that were on the receiving end of policy enforcement from Twitter found that the tweets themselves or related messages continued to spread on Twitter and other platforms.

* The study categorised the interventions from Twitter in 2 ways. Soft interventions - attaching labels without restriction on interactions (likes, retweets, replies, etc.). And hard interventions - removal or restriction on interactions.

* On Twitter: Tweets that were labelled spread further than those that were neither labelled nor restricted.

* On other networks: In general, for posts containing the same ‘messages’, those that were restricted on Twitter spread further those that were labelled or not labelled. But there are some subtleties to highlight (italics indicate quotes from the original paper):

* Facebook: Messages with/without labels had a similar “average number of posts on public Facebook pages and groups”. Messages that were restricted had “a higher average number of posts, were posted to pages with a higher average number of page subscribers, and received a higher average total number of engagements.”

* Instagram: On average number the posts, the pattern was similar to Facebook. However, with engagement, there was a difference in that “posts with a hard intervention received the fewest engagements, while posts with no interventions received the most engagements.”

* Reddit: Reddit doesn’t report engagement numbers in the same way as other platforms, so researchers had to use subreddit size (users) and frequency of posts: “messages that received a hard intervention on Twitter were posted more frequently and on pages with over five times as many followers as pages in which the other two message types were posted.”

* The authors note that the findings do not necessarily suggest that the ‘Streisand Effect’ was at play, pointing to the exceptional nature of the content/message itself as a possible reason for high engagement.

An important takeaway, as Renee DiResta aptly sums up, is “Misinformation is networked, content moderation is not”. It seems obvious from here to suggest that firms operating Digital Communication Networks (DCNs) should collaborate more closely with regard to such enforcement. However, that opens the door to what Evelyn Douek describes as 'Content Cartels' and potentially adds another binary to the DCN governance conversation (e.g. must-carry v/s must-remove, centralised v/s decentralised). But is there a middle ground we can find between these binaries?

Unbundling DCNs

In 2020, the ‘Working Group on Platform Scale’ at the Cyber Policy Center, Stanford University, proposed ‘middleware’.

By “middleware,” we refer to software products that can be appended to the major internet platforms. These products would interconnect with Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Twitter, and Google APIs and allow consumers to shape their feeds and influence the algorithms that those dominant platforms currently employ.

In fact, this approach of ‘unbundling’ DCNs in a way that users can also access them through third party services envisioned to be operating in a competitive marketplace is also apparent in earlier proposals such as magic APIs, protocols-not-platforms and competitive compatibility (I had done a preliminary comparison of them in June as well as a number of questions that still need to be answered).

In the context of DCNs, middleware, as proposed, could:

(provide) filters for specific news stories and (develop) ranking and labeling algorithms, which are then integrated into the main platform

In addition to user preferences, consumption, middleware could rely on public data sources (RSS feeds, news, etc.) as well as platform-specific data (but not related to the specific user or query/search).

Interoperability itself may happen by either consent or decree, though the working group expects that some legislation may be required to ensure that APIs are opened up. They also advocate for the existence of standards or guidelines that middleware companies will have to adhere to. These standards/guidelines can be defined by a regulator or the DCN firms themselves. I think this could be a contentious issue in the future as we dig deeper into questions related to state/regulatory capacity and incentives of firms.

The July edition of the Journal of Democracy included a special section titled ‘The Future of Platform Power’ focused on middleware which includes some interesting critique of the approach.

Daphne Keller (who proposed Magic APIs, and is optimistic about middleware) poses four questions that need to be addressed:

* Quality of service: Can middleware companies provide an equivalent or superior experience compared to the incumbents, and can they process the same volumes of data?

* Business models: How will middleware companies make profits? What incentives do platforms have to share revenues?

* Curation Costs: Large DCN firms employ/contract a significant number of people in content moderation roles. How can the ‘solved’ aspects of content moderation be replicated so that they can focus on the unique/un-solved aspects?

* Privacy: Are data generated by interactions in a users’ network available to middleware companies? If yes, there are privacy implications. If no, it limits the utility of middleware solutions and, therefore, their ability to compete with incumbents.

Joan Donovan and Robert Faris believe middleware is ‘fragmentation by design’ and question whether it will be lead to outcomes significantly different from the current system. They also raise the concern that middleware could, in theory, exacerbate polarisation. These are recurrent themes in most criticism of the approach. Dipyan Ghosh and Ramesh Srinivasan, like Donovan and Faris, believe the current set of challenges go beyond the narrow, content moderation-focused approach of middleware. Nathalie Maréchal raises the absence of a business model as a red flag:

This is essential: Middleware firms will have their own set of incentives and will need to be accountable to someone, be it a board of directors, shareholders, or some other entity. Incentives and accountability both depend on how the “middleware” providers will make money.

In a response essay, Francis Fukuyama states:

Our working group’s promotion of middleware rests on a normative view about the continuing importance of freedom of speech. Middleware is the most politically realistic way forward.

Our Reading Menu:

1) [Report] Inside the Shadowy World of Disinformation for Hire in Kenya by Odanga Madung and Brian Obilo

2) [Article] This is the real story of the Afghan biometric databases abandoned to the Taliban by Eileen Guo and Hikmat Noori

3) [Report] CSIS Technology and Intelligence Task Force’s Maintaining the Intelligence Edge has several recommendations for the future of intelligence agencies in the US.

4) [Report] The Economist has a stellar take on how OSINT punctures state monopolies of information and how this is a net positive.

5) [Article] Joseph Bernstein’s Harper’s Magazine cover story on the state of disinformation research.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hightechir.substack.com

Infopolitik: A Military Withdrawal in the Information Age

— Pranay Kotasthane

A month-and-half ago, I had tweeted this:

I had further written that:

“in the Industrial Age, such suppression could be covered up; that’s no longer the case in radically networked communities. The difference between the Afghanistan of 2001 and 2021 is mobile phones plus internet. Given these factors, the use of force against non-combatants is almost certain to receive instant condemnation from other countries. We can expect some backlash in US domestic politics as well. Such conflicts are global by default in the Information Age. The strength of these reactions might not be enough to change the overall decision (of the US). But it will be interesting to keep a watch from this angle.”

Little did I know that this assessment will play itself out within a matter of three weeks. Over the last ten days or so, the humanitarian crisis at the Kabul airport — more than the Taliban’s atrocities — has made it to phone screens across the globe. At the margin, this has had a positive effect of pushing national governments to allow more Afghan refugees in their countries. At the same time, the negative perception of the 2015 Syrian refugee influx has meant that the increase in refugee intake, at least in Europe, is unlikely to be significantly higher.

The Afghan situation is a subset of how a conflict will play out in the Information Age. Putnam’s classic two-level game framework describes the general case of conflict quite well. He argued that the politics of many international negotiations can be imagined as a two-level game.

At the national level, domestic groups pursue their interests by pressuring the government to adopt favorable policies, and politicians seek power by constructing coalitions among those groups. At the international level, national governments seek to maximize their own ability to satisfy domestic pressures, while minimizing the adverse consequences of foreign developments. Neither of the two games can be ignored by central decision-makers, so long as their countries remain interdependent, yet sovereign.

Here’s my illustration to describe this setup.

The politics of this setup operates as follows:

Each national political leader appears at both game boards. Across the international table sit his foreign counterparts, and at his elbows sit diplomats and other international advisors. Around the domestic table behind him sit party and parliamentary figures, spokespersons for domestic agencies, representatives of key interest groups, and the leader's own political advisors. The unusual complexity of this two-level game is that moves that are rational for a player at one board (such as raising energy prices, conceding territory, or limiting auto imports) may be impolitic for that same player at the other board. Nevertheless, there are powerful incentives for consistency between the two games. Players (and kibitzers) will tolerate some differences in rhetoric between the two games, but in the end either energy prices rise or they don't.

The key insight is this:

The political complexities for the players in this two-level game are staggering. Any key player at the international table who is dissatisfied with the outcome may upset the game board, and conversely, any leader who fails to satisfy his fellow players at the domestic table risks being evicted from his seat. On occasion, however, clever players will spot a move on one board that will trigger realignments on other boards, enabling them to achieve otherwise unattainable objectives.

In the Information Age, there’s a Level 3 game as well — the radically networked communities of the two negotiating parties can directly interact with each other. Given that groups can talk to each other directly, such interactions often affect what Level 1 and Level 2 negotiations can achieve. In the current refugee crisis, the level 3 connections are forcing a re-evaluation of hardened stances against migration at Level 2, at least in a few western countries.

As the situation at the Kabul airport improves, the focus will shift to the Level 3 interactions focusing on the Taliban’s repression. To what extent these interactions will affect the Level 1 & 2 games, I’m not sure. Nevertheless, this model provides a useful frame to parse the events that will unfold in Afghanistan in the coming months.

If the content in this newsletter interests you, consider taking up the Takshashila GCPP in Technology Policy. It is designed for technologists who want to explore public policy. By the end of this course, you will be able to use a #ResponsibleTech framework to systematically understand the ethical dimensions of technology advancements. Here’s a Twitter thread explaining the motivation behind the course.

Intake for the 30th cohort ends on 28th August. To know more, click here.

Cyberpolitik: The Taliban Question for Platforms

— Sapni GK

The Taliban's takeover of Kabul last week left many commentators and experts surprised. The quick capture of the elected Afghan government has caused great worry to social media platforms and their users in Afghanistan, wary about the digital footprints and the online lives of millions. When the Taliban was in power two decades ago, they had banned the internet in the country. However, today's landscape is different with an internet penetration of over 20% and four million social media users. In bigger cities like Kabul, people have been using the internet for the myriad conveniences it provides, including the use of social media platforms to voice opinions and concerns. For companies, content moderation, data handling practices, and a host of other digital rights are a cause of concern. For individual users under Taliban rule, these digital traces may be matters of life and death.  

The uncertainty around the future government has left social media platforms in a fix. Currently, Facebook Inc. and YouTube ban Taliban content on their platforms. However, Twitter and LinkedIn continue to allow the use of their platforms, provided the content policies are not violated. Additionally, many of these platforms have limited the visibility of the networks of users in Afghanistan.

The Taliban has learnt the art of managing social media platforms. These platforms are an ideal tool in their arsenal to create noise and build narratives that drown dissident voices from within the country. They have also used technologies such as biometric identification to target members of the armed forces, which now stokes the fear of misuse of the World Bank-supported national digital identity card system, Tazkira. 

Internet access opened up social and economic opportunities in Afghanistan, including the development of a nascent startup ecosystem in Kabul. These benefits now stand to be obliterated as the structure of most of these platforms is dependent on data collection. At the design level, they are structured to keep users continuously interacting and glued to the platform. The process of reclaiming the data held by these platforms, and removing one’s personal information is tedious, even in the presence of enabling legislation. This difficulty in erasing digital traces may aid the Taliban in identification and targeting. The organisation is reported to have used Facebook to identify targets in the past. At times like these, an easier exit out of the digital ecosystem of these platforms - a kill-switch - seems a legitimate ask. 

These companies have a lot of important decisions to make. Currently, the account of the President of Afghanistan remains suspended and inactive on Twitter, with no clarity on what happens if and when the Taliban is recognized as a legitimate government. Bigger questions arise in the absence of the 2006 constitution and a new regime based on a rigid interpretation of Sha'aria Law. Law enforcement, which may or may not follow the international norms of liberal interpretation of rights, would be a challenge for these platforms. To operate legitimately in the state, they might have to hand over incriminating evidence for acts previously not designated as crimes, contributing to the violation of otherwise accepted human rights such as free speech. It is a slippery slope for platforms on counts of privacy, data protection, content moderation, and free speech. Much depends on the stance taken by the international community and ensuring that these companies are not pushed to take calls denting the fabric of international political order. 

Antriksh Matters #1: GSLV, Do Not Go Gently into the Night

— Aditya Pareek

The cryogenic upper stage of a Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) failed barely five minutes into its ascent. According to media reports, the failed mission also took out an expensive and essential advanced Earth Observation Satellite, EOS-03/GISAT-1 along with it. ISRO expected the mission to be a success and even published detailed specs of the mission on its website. 

The loss comes after the launch of EOS-3 was delayed for nearly a year and a half following the pandemic. It’s a blow to India’s Earth-imaging capabilities, at least in the short term.

According to this New Indian Express editorial:

GISAT-1 was planned to be the first of two such identical satellites to be put into space to relay back crucial data. The two satellites were planned to image in the multispectral and hyper-spectral bands to provide near real-time pictures of large areas of the country—selected field images every five minutes and entire Indian landmass images every 30 minutes at 42-metre spatial resolution.

As this piece in The Print by Sandhya Ramesh explains, when compared to the failure rate of missions undertaken by space programmes and agencies of other nations, ISRO still fares very well.

Although ISRO has attributed the failure to a technical anomaly, more details if they are ever revealed, will only come out after an investigation. It may be too early to judge if the latest failure of the GSLV platform will result in delays and further setbacks for big-ticket India space programme missions like Chandrayaan II or Gaganyaan.

Antriksh Matters #2: Artemis and India’s Moonshot

— Aditya Ramanathan

In late July, the government of the Isle of Man, a self-governing British Crown Dependency with a population of less than 100,000, announced that it had agreed in principle to join the Artemis Accords. 

The Accords are a series of bilateral agreements between the United States and other countries. First announced in October 2020, the Accords lay down norms for lunar exploration. They are a prerequisite for joining NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration programme.

At present, 11 other states have signed the Accords with the US. 

The Isle of Man sought to become a hub for the global commercial space industry. If it signs the Accords with the US, it will join the United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, the UAE, Canada, Ukraine, Italy, and Luxembourg. 

The Artemis Accords pose a dilemma for India: signing them and joining the Artemis programme will greatly aid India’s own lunar ambitions. However, the Accords also potentially open up the moon and other celestial bodies to unregulated mining, and de facto assertions of ownership of the celestial real estate.

Despite these risks, it makes sense for India to sign up to the Accords while maintaining its flexibility by pursuing other options, including space cooperation with Russia, and pushing for a new set of multilaterally accepted rules for space activity. 

The Promise and Peril of Artemis

The Artemis Accords list 10 principles that seek to lay down norms for operating on the Moon. 

These are: the use of space for peaceful purposes, transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, registration of space objects, release of scientific data, protecting heritage in space, allowing the extraction and use of resources in space, deconflicting activities, and managing orbital debris and ensuring the safe disposal of spacecraft.

Most of these principles are innocuous and in line with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), to which all spacefaring states adhere. The provision for protecting heritage in space is primarily meant to protect areas of historical significance like the site of the 1969 Apollo 11 Lunar Module landing in the Sea of Tranquility. 

The provision that raises the greatest concern is the one allowing the extraction and use of resources. While the OST bars states from asserting sovereignty on celestial bodies, it leaves open a loophole wide enough to allow two things: for states and private entities to claim ownership over resources extracted from celestial bodies, and for private entities to claim ownership or stewardship of celestial real estate (without an associated claim of state sovereignty). Indeed, the innocuous provision for deconfliction could allow states or private entities to declare ‘exclusion zones’ with no time limit, making possession nine-tenths of the law.

The Artemis Accords appear to be well designed to take advantage of this loophole. 

It is not surprising that the US would seek such provisions. It dominates the commercial space industry and stands to accrue the greatest benefits. In 2015, the US Congress passed a bill that allowed private entities and citizens to use the resources of celestial bodies. Later, in April 2020, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the Secretary of State to pursue diplomatic agreements that enable “commercial recovery and use of space resources”.

India’s Imperfect Options

Why should India care? Unregulated mining and claims of ownership, whether de facto or otherwise, could lead to negative externalities and deny smaller spacefarers opportunities. 

The greatest potential negative externalities from mining would be the spread of lunar dust, which would be propagated quickly across the Moon’s low gravity, zero-atmosphere environment. This extremely fine dust can hamper and endanger lunar operations. 

These externalities will become even more evident when the principles of the Accords are extended to the Asteroid Belt, where mining could create debris fields and even dangerously modify the orbits of smaller asteroids. 

Finally, the finders-keepers model of lunar governance could allow larger spacefarers to monopolise the Moon’s resources, leaving smaller spacefarers like India at their mercy. 

India has three options: one, it can sign the Artemis Accords (and thus join the Artemis programme), two, it can join rival programmes such as the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) programme led by Russia and China, and three, it can pursue multilateral agreements through the UN or other bodies. 

As a medium-rung spacepower, India cannot fulfil its lunar ambitions on its own. It can only do so in cooperation with others. That means eschewing both the Artemis and ILRS programmes is not a viable option for India. While India must continue to pursue bilateral space cooperation with Russia, its prospects with the ILRS programme may be limited because of the presence of a hostile China. The Artemis programme, which includes the other three members of the Quad, as well as other friendly spacefarers, offers better prospects in the short term. India would benefit from signing up for it.

However, over the longer term, India must seek to maintain its flexibility and leverage by seeking to participate in all multilateral lunar exploration programmes, whether they be Artemis, ILRS, or other future projects. Simultaneously, India must also nudge spacefaring states towards multilateral norms regulating activities on celestial bodies, whether through UN-based mechanisms or independently. The best outcome for India isn’t to pick one option, it is to pursue all of them.

Check out Takshashila’s paper on India and the Artemis Accords here.

Antriksh Matters #3: Satellites for Climate Change Research

-Ruturaj Gowaikar

Two recent events highlighted the importance of satellite-based sensors in climate change research. The first being an announcement about BRICS Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation and data sharing. And the second being the publication of the 6th assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

BRICS agreement on Remote Sensing satellites

This agreement was signed at a meeting chaired by India on 17 August and saw the presence of the respective chiefs of the space agencies of BRICS states. The chairman of ISRO and Secretary in the Department of Space, K. Sivan, was the signatory on behalf of India.

This agreement paves a way to form a virtual constellation of six satellites already in orbit, and their respective ground stations at Cuiaba of Brazil, Moscow Region of Russia, Shadnagar–Hyderabad of India, Sanya of China, and Hartebeesthoek of South Africa. The satellites are CBERS-4 (jointly by Brazil and China), Kanopus-V type (of Russia), Resourcesat-2 and -2A (of India) and GF-6 and ZY-3/02 (of China).

The CBERS-4 is a second-generation satellite of the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite Series. It is equipped with a MUXCam (Multispectral Camera), PanMUX (Panchromatic and Multispectral Camera), IRS (Infrared System) or IRMSS-2 (Infrared Multispectral Scanner-2), and WFI (Wide-Field Imager). All these sensors make it ideal to carry out its mission objectives of monitoring forest and water resources. 

The Russian Kanopus-V is a minisatellite launched with an aim to monitor the Earth's surface, the atmosphere, ionosphere, and magnetosphere and study the probability of strong earthquake occurrence. Sensors on it are PSS (Panchromatic Imaging System), MSS (Multispectral Imaging System), MSU-200 (Multispectral Scanner Unit). These sensors enable it to monitor land surfaces, sea surfaces, and ice sheets as well.

Indian satellites Resourcesat-2 and -2A have a mission objective to provide remote sensing data for integrated land and water resources management at the micro-level. On-board sensors allow them to acquire images in four spectral bands ranging from Visible and Near-Infrared (VNIR) to Shortwave Infrared (SWIR) wavelengths. These sensors are Advanced Wide-Field Sensor (AWiFS), Linear Imaging Self-Scanning Sensor-3 (LISS-3), and Linear Imaging Self-Scanning Sensor-4 (LISS-4).

The Chinese GF-6 (Gaofen-6) is an optical satellite developed under China’s High-definition Earth Observation System (CHEOS). It is the first precision agriculture observation satellite of China, with capabilities of ultra-wide imaging. It can capture images in the NIR spectra. The second Chinese satellite is of the ZiYuan series. The ZY-03 is a civilian satellite with high resolution and stereoscopic mapping capabilities. Stereoscopic imaging is possible due to the offset of 22º between its three in-line telescoping cameras. ZY-03 can also capture images in NIR.

 Reports indicate that the idea for a BRICS constellation had its origin in a 2016 meeting under the auspices of the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. The successful signing of this agreement between India and China is an important milestone for the two countries with little history of formal cooperation in the space sector.

IPCC report of 2021

The 1st part of the 6th IPCC report has data and analysis on recent improvements in the field of climate science. This includes data on heatwaves, the effect of clouds on climate systems, and data on extreme events like droughts and precipitation at a local level. Such studies were possible as climate models have become accurate due to the incorporation of data obtained from satellite-based sensors. The contribution of data from satellite sensors in IPCC reports is steadily increasing after the 4th report in 2007.

Satellite-based sensors have advantages over land-based sensors to monitor essential climate variables (ECVs). They can provide high-quality, continuous data of a region, and the instruments aren’t affected by local weather conditions. Moreover, certain ECVs like gravitational effects of continental ice sheets can only be monitored by satellite-based sensors. The Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) currently specifies 54 ECVs, of which about 60 per cent can be addressed by satellite data.

Another factor in the improvement of climate models is the standardization of data processing, sharing, and reporting parameters between space agencies, governments, and scientists of various countries. Organisations and agreements like the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) of the World Research Climate Programme and the Office for Outer Space Affairs of the United Nations promote cooperation in this area. Thus, satellites will continue to provide an ideal platform for climate monitoring and international cooperation. 

Our Reading Menu

1) [Paper] The use of remote sensing to support the application of multilateralenvironmental agreements by Nicolas Peter

2) [Paper] Reimagining Social Media Governance: Harm, Accountability, and Repair by Sarita Schoenebeck and Lindsay Blackwell

3) [Paper] Escaping the 'Impossibility of Fairness': From Formal to Substantive Algorithmic Fairness by Ben Green

4) [Infographics and Article] How satellites are used to monitor climate change

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hightechir.substack.com

Matsyanyaaya: Technology and National Power

— Pranay Kotasthane

To say that technology impacts geopolitics is to state the obvious. There are new books and articles written every day about how technology X might impact State Y’s politics. Yet, there are surprisingly few frameworks that precisely articulate the ways in which technologies can increase or decrease national power.

It is for this reason that I found a recent CSET Report National Power after AI interesting. The central argument of the report is that major, widely used technologies — such as AI — alter the power of states and societies in a fundamental and non-linear manner. This means even previously disadvantageous factors that held a state back may become advantageous in the new setting. For example, the application of AI would require large and varied data points, favouring authoritarian states which already extract such information from their citizens.

Keeping the AI angle aside, the report identifies three ways in which major innovations impact national power:

“First, innovations introduce new elements of power. Major innovations, in changing how states generate power, can create new factors that must be considered in characterizing power. For example, the advent of railroads, internal combustion engines, and nuclear weapons dramatically increased the importance of a state’s access to steel, oil, and uranium, respectively. New factors, however, are not only limited to materials. They may also encompass characteristics of a society’s culture, organizations, or economic activities.”

When we talk about technology and geopolitics, it is usually this first level of impact that’s being referred to. An example that comes to my mind is how ASML’s mastery over Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) increased Netherlands’ national power and made it an important — even if unwilling — player in the ongoing US-China confrontation over semiconductors.

“Second, innovations change the importance of existing elements of power. Major innovations also change the “coefficients” of existing elements of power, causing them to matter more or less than before. For example, Mongol light cavalry, modern navies, and ballistic missiles all changed how geographic barriers affected one’s balance of power with geographic neighbors, eroding the effectiveness of simple remoteness, oceans, and armies still in the field, respectively, as shields against coercive power. Industrialization meant the inventiveness of a nation’s scientists and engineers became more important.”

At this level, the example that comes to mind is how the technology to blind a state’s satellite can reduce the military effectiveness of that state.

“Finally, innovations alter states’ intermediate goals. Perhaps least obviously, major innovations sometimes broadly alter what policies states pursue, by making certain kinds of behavior more valuable or less costly. While states retain the same ultimate ends, such as securing survival and prosperity, the intermediate, instrumental goals they pursue to reach those ends may shift. This can drive dramatic changes in state goals and policies. For example, before the Industrial Revolution, potential productivity gains in areas like agriculture and manufacturing were small and stable; this made conquering territory a primary means by which one group could increase its wealth and security. During and after the Industrial Revolution, modern states could also pursue substantial military and economic growth by applying new technologies to increase productivity.”

This is perhaps the least explored impact of technology. An example: in the current context, engaging in information warfare — both domestically and internationally — is one behaviour that states find tempting.

This three-level framework is a good starting point for High-tech geopolitics. In subsequent editions, I’ll explore different facets of this argument.

SiliconPolitik: What’s India Good at, Really?

— Pranay Kotasthane

With so much talk around the semiconductor shortage, it is useful to analyse where India stands in this sector. With that intention, four of us got together to do a Strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats (SWOT) analysis of India’s semiconductor ecosystem. The result is a discussion SlideDoc that we think should be useful for policymakers and foreign policy analysts alike.

Specifically, we find that:

“India’s primary strength lies in its vibrant integrated circuit (IC) design ecosystem with a highly experienced talent pool. However, weak research & development (R&D) focus, prohibitive costs of acquiring intellectual property (IP), and limited start-up capital have inhibited the potential of local design houses.

In semiconductor manufacturing, misplaced policies prioritising capital intensive leading-edge nodes have led to several false starts. The real opportunity for India lies in trailing edge node fabs and speciality fabs.

Finally, in the absence of backward linkages with fabrication plants or forward linkages with Original Device Manufacturers (ODMs) or Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), doing business in the Assembly, Testing, Marking & Packaging (ATMP) segment in India becomes prohibitively expensive.

We recommend that India should strive to create a world-class fabless ecosystem by facilitating domestic design IP creation. The ATMP market is gradually becoming R&D intensive and the demand for product conceptualisation skills is increasing. India will have to align its skilling policies in alignment with the industry. Further, we suggest that India “looks outward” and leverages consortiums like the Quad to pool in resources, jointly invest, and conduct trade to obtain critical access to materials, technological know-how, and markets for semiconductors.”

Do give the full document a read and send in your comments to us.

If the content in this newsletter interests you, consider taking up the Takshashila GCPP in Technology Policy. It is designed for technologists who want to explore public policy. By the end of this course, you will be able to use a #ResponsibleTech framework to systematically understand the ethical dimensions of technology advancements.

Intake for the 30th cohort ends on 28th August. To know more, click here.

Antariksh Matters: Space Stations Edition

- Aditya Pareek

Cosmopolitik: Russia’s “Nauka” rocks the ISS

Russia’s newest module for the International Space Station(ISS), Nauka(“Наука” in Cyrillic) was launched on 21st July. Nauka successfully docked with the Russian section of the ISS on 29th July but not without some high-octane series of events. An unexpected firing of Nauka’s thrusters, according to NASA, caused the ISS to “lose altitude control” or “tilt” to 540’. The situation was serious but not catastrophic or posed a danger to the ISS’s inhabitants.

In simpler terms, the entire ISS spun “one and a half times” and ended up upside down, but with mitigation measures, in the end, it returned to its correct position.

Other thrusters on Russia’s older Zvezda Module and Progress Cargo ship, which are also docked to ISS, tried to correct the spinning ISS until Nauka’s thrusters stopped firing -eventually setting things right without any loss to life or material.

ROSCOSMOS, the Russian state space company, clarified that the unexpected, unintended firing of Nauka’s thrusters was due to a software glitch.

The saga is interesting because earlier this year, Russia and ROSCOSMOS had publicly announced plans for their own separate space station and were contemplating quitting ISS by 2025. With Nauka in the picture, the latter is unlikely at least in the near future. Russia’s concern that the ISS is fairly old and may pose a risk to its crew, in the long run, is not unfounded. The risk can be gauged from the increased amount of upkeep and maintenance work on their modules in recent times.

Nauka, true to its name, which in Russian literally means Science is a research module. According to this TASS report, the module will also soon house greenhouse facilities able “to grow plants on an industrial scale.”

The Russian version of the same report naturally has more details and is worth checking out with even a machine translation.

Dragon in Orbit is a Soviet Imitator

It is also important to note that, earlier this year, China put into orbit its first module called Tianhe for its separate space station dubbed Tiangong. Tiangong is significantly smaller than the ISS, and much more comparable to the former Soviet space station Mir, both in form and function - especially the module by module assembly in orbit aspect.

Cyberpolitik #1: Outrage against the machine

-Prateek Waghre

‘Outrage as a business model’ that’s the headline from a recent article investigating The Daily Wire’s use of Facebook ‘to build an empire’ [Miles Parks - NPR]. The article demonstrates that The Daily Wires receives significantly higher engagement per Facebook post than mainstream outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN and Fox News, as well as conservative non-mainstream counterparts like Breitbart News, The Blaze and The Western Journal (in general, as per the article, conservative non-mainstream counterparts receive higher engagement on Facebook than mainstream sources)

One quote, in particular, got my attention:

“ (The Daily Wire) has turned anger into an art form and recycled content into a business model.”

Some insights on outrage as a business model can be gleaned from The Outrage Industry by Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj. They define outrage as a genre (it was first published in 2013, so the focus, understandably, is on talk radio, tv news and blogs).

They distinguish it from emotion (emphasis added):

“What distinguishes this type of discourse is not that it seeks to evoke emotion in the political arena. On the contrary, emotional speech has an important place in political life, and many emotional appeals are not outrageous. What makes outrage distinctive are the tactics used in an effort to provoke the emotion.”

And incivility:

“outrage is incivility writ large. It is by definition uncivil but not all incivility is outrage. Rude behavior such as eye-rolling, sighing, and the like are not outrageous because they do not incorporate the elements of malfeasant inaccuracy and intent to diminish that characterize outrage.”

So, what it is then? They identify some attributes:

* Has a discursive style to elicit reactions through ‘overgeneralisation, sensationalism, misleading/inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks, and ridicule’. It favours “melodrama, misrepresentative exaggeration, mockery, and hyperbolic forecasts of impending doom” over nuance.

* Personality centred where the voice of other participants take a back seat to a single dominant voice whose worldview drives things forward.

* Reactive in the sense that such content often starts out as a ‘response’ to events that need to be ‘unpacked’ or ‘reinterpreted’.

* Ideologically selectiveness follows from 3 in that the dominant actors from 2 can choose/define what they react to.

* Engaging since it is essentially a performance.

* Marked by ‘internal intertextuality’, i.e. outrage content producers frequently refer to one another.

* Rely on oversimplification to communicate.

Pause here for a second and think about how much content we come across today checks many of these boxes, even the things we agree with.

What’s changed between the past and now? The increase in the number of ‘venues’ where one can express outrage, speed of circulation and the interplay between mainstream news and outrage venues which react and respond to each others’ reporting.

They also stress the supply-side of outrage-driven content, the changed dynamics of which are attributed to the fragmentation of audiences. In a public sphere with few venues, the incentives of content producers are (generally) to offend the least amount of people possible. In a fragmented public sphere where the aim is to reach ‘niche’ audiences, that may no longer apply (bullets added).

“structural changes we describe have rendered outrage politically and financially profitable, whether those profits appear in the form of

* increased advertising revenues (linked directly to ratings and traffic)

* fundraising dollars

* political support, coming in the form of votes, increased support for policy positions

* increased membership in advocacy groups.”

Put another way, tribalism (of a certain kind) seems to bring profits for outrage-driven content producers. Note: they do clarify that fragmentation is not the only factor - social, cultural and political forces also shape what kind of content is ultimately financially profitable.

But, there is a demand-side to it as well (that doesn’t absolve supply-side actors). In Angrynomics, Eric Lonergan contends that there are 2 sides to ‘public anger’ - moral outrage and tribal rage :

* Moral outrage: The positive form which seeks to draw attention to a problem that needs to be fixed.

* Tribal rage: Negative form that wants to dominate, suppress or destroy.

(the fascinating bit about this distinction is that even the acts classifying displays of public anger as moral outrage or tribal rage are not going to be independent of tribal or partisan considerations)

Here too, there is a stress on (a subset of) supply-side actors:

“cynical politicians effortlessly play on both forms of anger to garner support.”

One can reasonably argue that it is no longer just politicians who do this.

On why outrage works, Berry and Sobieraj say:

“It works because its coarseness and emotional pull offer the “pop” that breaks through the competitive information environment, and it works because it draws on so many of our existing cultural touchstones: celebrity culture, reality television, a two-party system, as well as the conventional news and opinion to which those in the United States have become accustomed”

They also refer to the collapse of local news, which is fairly common in any literature that tries to make sense of our fraying social norms [Sample: Murtaza Hussain - The Intercept, or the U.S. Antitrust Subcommittee Report]. Yet, not all of these will make sense in every context. In India, we’re certainly not a two-party polity, and while there is concern about the viability of news media business models, the specific role of ‘local news outlets’ seems to be underexplored (also, how does one define local, city-level? state-level? based on language?). So while I’m not sure I agree with all the attributes listed in the last quote, I do agree with this:

“Recognizing the economic underpinnings of the genre is vital for a more complete understanding of its prevalence, as these insights advance our ability to recognize the phenomena as culturally and politically dependent, but not reducible to culture or politics. Without this lens, the repetition of outrage discourse across media platforms can be read erroneously as an indicator of a landmark shift in political orientation on the part of the audience or of profound cultural intolerance and insularity.”

They do list 2 caveats of sorts, though:

* It isn’t necessary that advertisers will dictate content choices. In fact, they frame this as a ‘narrow view’ (while it probably holds true for most advertisers, but there is scope to consider how it can impact choices/incentives when there is a heavy dependency on a subset of advertisers).

* Commercially driven media will not always lead to adverse outcomes for democracy. Rather they are indifferent to it (a recent paper advocating for the study of collective behaviour affected by digital communication networks [see Technopolitik 5, Cyberpolitik #2] to be considered a “crisis discipline” made a similar point about the indifference of business models).

This post is adapted from MisDisMal-Information 46

Biotechpolitik: AlphaFold - AI for protein folding

-Ruturaj Gowaikar

DeepMind, the AI arm of Google, made codes for its neural network ‘AlphaFold’ available to the public in July 2021. By doing this, a powerful AI tool to predict protein folding has become available to the global scientific community. DeepMind was a British tech startup that Google acquired. It shot to fame when one of their neural networks, AlphaGo, beat the European champion at a strategy-based board game called ‘Go’. AlphaFold, another product of DeepMind, is a computational proteomic toolset to complement the genomic revolution of the last two decades, during which DNA sequencing had become cheap, fast, and accurate. 

However, the determination of protein folding from the corresponding DNA sequence using conventional methods continues to be a laborious and expensive process. Various computational methods were being used to address this issue. DeepMind, using its expertise in neural networks, has provided the global scientific community with one of the fastest protein folding prediction tools. It can predict protein folding in a matter of hours to days, a significant improvement from the years it took previously using physical methods. 

Solving the protein folding problem

Proteins are the molecules responsible for all biological activities, from lending structure to a cell to performing biochemical reactions. A protein is made up of several linear chains of amino acids called polypeptides. This sequence of amino acids can be easily inferred from the corresponding DNA sequence of its gene. But this data is of relatively little value as what determines the function of a protein is its unique 3D structure. Predicting protein structure is challenging as a polypeptide chain can theoretically fold onto itself in 10300 ways. Moreover, two polypeptides can interact with each other to form even more complex structures. Therefore, predicting protein structure from a linear amino-acid sequence is a computationally challenging problem. Given the lack of advanced computational tools, researchers have resorted to experimental techniques like X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy, and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR). These techniques require specialized equipment and are time-consuming. 

AlphaFold is an algorithm that predicts the final protein structure using deep learning models. It uses a two-step approach. In the first step, two deep neural networks were trained on roughly 100,000 proteins whose structures are already known. One neural network was trained to predict inter-amino-acid distances, while the other was trained to predict the angle of joints between consecutive amino acids. In the second step, a gradient descent algorithm was used to optimize these parameters to best match the results from the first step. 

The hardware running the two neural networks uses approximately 16 TPUc3s that is equivalent to 100-200 GPUs, a relatively modest hardware requirement.

Along with the source code, DeepMind has also released structures of ~350,000 proteins predicted using AlphaFold. This includes all proteins encoded by the human genome and proteins of model organisms used in research. The protein database is being maintained in conjunction with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL).

Significance

Availability of the source code will enable researchers to develop the algorithm further, resulting in a reduction of the time required to predict protein folding. The cost of such research will also reduce significantly as sole reliance on physical techniques currently being used will fall. However, physical and experimental techniques will still be required to validate and confirm structures that AI programs like AlphaFold will predict.

This development has more significance during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Global genomic surveillance efforts have led to different strains of the coronavirus being identified. AlphaFold can aid in identifying the corresponding changes in protein structure in these new strains. This can assist in the development of better vaccines and treatment protocols to specifically target these proteins. Some US universities have started using AlphaFold for such research. 

The other applications of computational protein predictions are to use this technique to develop novel proteins such as oil-degrading enzymes, heavy metal absorbing proteins etc., that are not produced by any living organisms. Such proteins can have applications in clearing out oil spills and efficient waste management. 

Cyberpolitik #2: Why 5G Standards Matter 

-Arjun Gargeyas

The process of setting and influencing the industry standards for emerging technologies across the globe has become a strong geopolitical tool for aspiring global powers. With the ability to completely control future prospects in a specific technology, states lobby hard for the acceptance of their backed standards in order to have the upper hand in the global supply chains and development projects of the respective sector. The arrival of 5G technology coincided with the US-China trade war, which made 5G effectively the fulcrum of geopolitical and geoeconomic rivalry between the erstwhile Trump administration and the Chinese government. With China consistently increasing its presence in the leadership positions of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) subgroups, the organization responsible for setting international communication standards, its influence is clearly seen with the already confirmed Release 15 and Release 16 standards. This is most likely to continue into the Release 17 standards, which are expected to be out in early 2022. But the question is, does it actually matter to a country like India if its geopolitical rival, China, has a major say in setting these global standards or is it just hollow talk?

One of the main reasons that China wants to assert itself in the race to set and influence the international standards in 5G technology is that the telecommunication industry in China has had to spend huge sums of money in royalty payments towards major Western technology companies who had patent rights to critical technologies in the 3G and 4G/LTE era. China’s telecommunication industry has effectively managed to gain the first-mover advantage in the 5G race. They are keen for their homegrown companies to set the next standards and essentially get the bulk of the Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) with respect to 5G technology. This will result in Chinese companies and the state generating a large sum of revenue through patent licensing and royalty payments which can then be used to fund R&D in critical technologies. The China Standards 2035 project being undertaken by the Chinese government is just an affirmation of the argument that this is indeed a priority and a fast-track route into achieving global superpower status. 

Should this concern India and other geopolitical rivals of China? If it should, what is the possible recourse we have? India has had to rely on standards in major technologies, mainly from Western countries. There has been a consistent effort by India to make its presence felt on the global technological standards stage, with 2020 showing a major breakthrough for the Indian telecommunication industry when it got the approval for a locally developed 5G standard from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) named 5Gi. Now, the extent to which the 5Gi economically and geopolitically benefits India can be extensively debated. Still, the fact that India now views international standards in emerging technologies as a concrete area of geopolitical leverage shows the importance of the 5G (and other technology) standards. 

The hegemony of any country controlling critical technology standards like 5G will have major repercussions on the geopolitical stage. This might result in global supply chains concentrating in favour of whichever country has the necessary patents and has set the standards for using said technology. It is imperative that the discussion of international standards in critical technologies finds a place in every state's foreign policy.

Our Reading Menu

* [Paper] Critical assessment of methods of protein structure prediction (CASP) — round x

* [Report] China Standards 2035 Project

* [Paper] The Geopolitics of 5G

* [Briefing] The Economist has a briefing on Open Source Intelligence and its impact on geopolitics. More on this in the next edition.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hightechir.substack.com

Siliconpolitik: The Upcoming Quad Summit

-Pranay Kotasthane

News reports suggest that the first in-person Quad summit is likely to be held in September. The last online summit-level meeting created three working groups on vaccines, critical & emerging technologies (C&ET), and climate change.

Though there has been some action on vaccine delivery, there are virtually no updates about the outcomes of the other two working groups. At least on the C&ET front, it seems to me that a vast agenda has bogged down any meaningful collaboration. To this day, it seems that the four countries do not even agree on which technologies are critical and emerging, and which aren’t.

The four states will be looking for ways to get out of this rut as they meet in September. Hence it is useful to recommend C&ET ‘actionables’ that can be announced as part of this summit.

I have earlier written why a semiconductor partnership would be an ideal start for the Quad C&ET collaboration. In this edition, here are a few tangible action items to begin this partnership.

One, announce a Quad Semiconductor Supply Chain Resilience Fund. Think of this as a multi-sovereign wealth fund but for semiconductor investments across the Quad countries. This fund could focus on two areas:

* create a roadmap for new manufacturing facilities across the Quad countries. One of the focus areas should be to secure supplies not just at the leading-edge nodes but also at key trailing-edge nodes, which will continue to remain workhorses for automotive, communications (5G), and AI.

* Sponsor new standard developments such as composite semiconductors and create one centre for excellence in each Quad country in an area of its immediate interest. For example, Australia could host the CoE for new materials in electronics, Japan could host the CoE for silicon manufacturing equipment, while the US and India could host CoEs on specific fabless design architectures.

Two, and this one is an even more ambitious goal, facilitate strategic alliances between companies in the four quad states.

A precedent to learn from is the US-Japan arrangement in the early 1990s by when memory manufacturing had moved out from the US to Japan for cost reasons. The US National Research Council came out with a report in 1992 studying the types of alliances between US and Japanese semiconductor companies and recommended specific actions to take in furthering each of these arrangements.

For example, the table below captured the sixteen types of alliances used by US and Japanese semiconductor companies.

Nearly thirty years later, this typology remains a useful guide for Quad collaboration on semiconductors. Each area needs government facilitation. For example, reducing export control requirements between quad countries can aid more licensing, cross-licensing, and technology exchange arrangements. Similarly, lowering investment screening mechanisms for quad countries can accelerate joint development and acquisition arrangements.

In short, there is much that can be done on the Quad C&ET agenda through the siliconpolitik route.

Mineralpolitik: The Global Hustle for REEs 

-Aditya Pareek

Rare Earth Elements(REE) are critical to modern high-tech supply chains. China has captured much of the Rare Earths market over the past three decades. One reason for this has been its willingness to bear the steep ecological cost of extracting and processing REEs. 

In 2010, during a dispute between China and Japan, the world got its first memorable jolt of how China’s dominance of the sector can affect the supply of everything - from strategically important tech to consumer electronics. Ever since, the need for diversifying and building separate supply chains not reliant on China has been felt and the COVID-19 induced disruption has only exacerbated these impulses. 

However, according to recently published data, as quoted in SCMP and Reuters, China’s Rare Earths exports have proliferated by a significant margin (25.3% compared to the first half of 2020 and 16.5% compared to the first half of 2019). While the US and other Quad states may be planning to shift away from China, it will take years for this to become a reality.

According to an opinion piece in the Diplomat, Myanmar, which saw a military coup earlier this year, and has again become a pariah state to the West, is the “third-largest source of mined Rare Earths”. Most of these mines from which Mayanmar’s REEs come are in the long-troubled Kachin state region. 

Dysprosium is an important REE component in Neodymium magnets which in turn are used to build everything from basic motors in consumer electronics and appliances like cars, washing machines to all conceivable complex military equipment such as drones, combat vehicle engines, submarine electric propulsion systems etc.

“The price of dysprosium oxide shot up nearly 60 percent in March, amid fears that prolonged unrest in Myanmar could tie up shipments of ores and concentrates.” 

As this feature in Mining Technology highlights, Tanzania can also soon emerge as a major supplier of very “high-grade neodymium praseodymium (NdPr) deposits in the world”. The neodymium supply, if it materialises, will be an important new source for building REE permanent magnets that are imperative to most modern systems civilian and military.

An alternative source of REEs, apart from traditional mining methods, maybe urban mining, which is basically recycling REEs from scrapyards and garbage dumps containing REE rich e-waste. Until now, this hasn’t been a source of a significant amount of the world’s REE supply but as this article in Ars Technica points out over time it may emerge as a major source. 

If the content in this newsletter interests you, consider taking up the Takshashila GCPP in Technology Policy. It is designed for technologists who want to explore public policy. By the end of this course, you will be able to use a #ResponsibleTech framework to systematically understand the ethical dimensions of technology advancements.

Intake for the 30th cohort ends on 22nd August. To know more click here.

Cyberpolitik #1: The Secret’s Out

-Nitansha Bansal

It is happening again! Proof of global surveillance exercised by the states has once again come to light, this time in the form of the Pegasus Project. It is a coordinated effort of Forbidden Stories, a French media non-profit, and Amnesty International. Eighty journalists from ten countries collaborated to unearth the global spying tool with the technical support of Amnesty’s Security Lab which conducted forensic tests to identify the traces of Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO’s spyware called Pegasus. 

Spyware is malicious software that enters a device, gathers data and transmits it to a server without the consent of the owner of the data. Pegasus is such a powerful cyber-surveillance tool that it is classified as a weapon and requires the same export clearances as a lethal weapon, explains Suhasini Haider, the Diplomatic Affairs Editor of The Hindu.

Once injected into the target’s device, it can read messages and mails, access call logs and stored files, switch on and off the device, turn on the camera and microphone, and can even affect the devices near the targeted device, without the knowledge of the device owner. Until 2018, NSO relied on Enhanced Social Engineering Message (ESEM) i.e. a malicious SMS or a WhatsApp message to inject Pegasus into the target’s device. However, the latest version of Pegasus is a zero-click spyware i.e. spyware that does not need the target to click on any link or pick any calls. The target does not need to interact with the spyware. It can enter the target’s device merely by sending a push notification or by sending a missed call to the device.

In 2016, Canadian Citizen Lab first flagged the cybersecurity threat presented by Pegasus to Apple. Then in 2019, WhatsApp blamed the NSO for exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in its video calling feature to inject spyware into users’ devices. Citizen Lab reported again in 2020 about governments using Pegasus to spy on journalists at Al Jazeera and Al Araby TV. Now, the Pegasus Project has reportedly revealed over fifty thousand targeted contact numbers which are mostly concentrated in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Hungary and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

State surveillance is not new. What is new is the ease of surveillance and the engagement of the private sector in mass surveillance.

Also new is the Internet of Things (IoT), which could allow objects of daily use like cars and kitchen equipment to provide information about owners. It was with Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that the world realized the omnipresence of the state in their daily lives.

The symbiotic relationship between government spies and private companies has changed surveillance. Commercial corporations provide the technology, equipment as well as required information on citizens to government agencies in the form of online payment, searches, shopping, social media etc.

What is also worth noticing in the case of Pegasus is the export of surveillance technologies from one country to another. NSO has maintained that the Israeli Minister of Defence has to approve NSO’s clients to make sure that the spyware is not used against Israel or its interests.

I wonder if categorising nations as democratic or authoritarian has become archaic. We would do more justice to contemporary times if we compared governments on the basis of the mass surveillance they conduct on their own.

Cyberpolitik #2: Digital Communication Networks and their harms

-Prateek Waghre

Digital Communication Networks (defined below) have led to concerns about rapid changes in the scale and structure of human networks, their impact on the quality of the information in circulation, and the role played by algorithms in directing the flow of information. Seventeen researchers have called for the study of collective behaviour to be elevated to a ‘crisis discipline’.

A Takshashila Working Paper published earlier this week categorised the various harms attributed to Digital Communication Networks (DCNs). We define DCNs as composite entities consisting of the following components:

* Capability: Internet-based products/services that enable instantaneous low-cost or free communication across geographic, social, and cultural boundaries. This communication may be private (1:1), limited (1:n e.g. messaging groups), or broad (Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, YouTube videos, live streaming ), and so on.

* Operator(s): Firms/groups that design/operate these products and services.

* Networks: The entities/groups/individuals that adopt/use these products and services, and their interactions with each other.

We did this because we felt existing terms such as ‘social media’, ‘big tech’, ‘digital platforms’, can be limited by context-dependence, or be too broad or too narrow. The proposed framing, we believe, encourages their study from the perspective of their effects on societies as a whole, rather than focussing on specific companies, technologies, sharing mechanisms, user dynamics, and other attributes which are constantly evolving.

The paper classifies the harms attributed based on whether they have competitive, data-related or narrative effects.

It then categorises these harms as potential market failures (3), social problems (13) and cognitive biases (9). The wide range of social problems and cognitive biases highlight the need for further study of the psychosocial effects of these harms and their broader impact in the Indian context. These considerations also raise the questions of how, and whether, the antitrust interventions currently being pursued in some of the developed economies will affect DCNs across competition, data and narrative spheres in the rest of the world.

This is the first in a series of papers that will explore the different aspects of DCNs. Future work will investigate the benefits that DCNs enable, assess overlaps and contradictions between proposed or enacted DCN governance measures, and examine the role of global internet governance mechanisms.

You can read a pdf version of the paper here.

Our Reading Menu

* [Report] Some very useful conceptual thinking on what AI means for national power by the folks at Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

* Takshashila’s A Rare Earths Strategy for India [Discussion Document]

* Dr Yamuna Singh’s [Book] is the most comprehensive volume on the scientific and pragmatic context of REE extraction and processing in India.

* Kim Zetter’s [Book] Countdown to Zero Day.

* Andy Greenberg’s [Book] Sandworm.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hightechir.substack.com