Technology Archive

Although events in the Middle East confirm that the power of an angry crowd in a public square remains potent, the Internet is fast becoming the medium of choice for spreading political ideas. The number of global Internet users has doubled during the past five years, and now exceeds 2 billion people. In response, governments worldwide are seeking new means to influence and often control this discourse. Freedom House’s newly released report, “Freedom on the Net 2011: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media” (.pdf), shows how governments have employed deviously creative tactics to control Web sites, blogs and […]

The cables were cut multiple times, despite being buried beneath the Mediterranean seabed, five miles off the Egyptian coast, near Alexandria. As a result, Internet finance and commercial traffic stalled in at least 10 Middle Eastern and Asian countries in early 2008. More than 80 million Web users in India, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia had connection problems. Egypt and Pakistan alone lost 70 percent of their digital connections to the outside world. “It even affected [U.S. Central Command],” said James Lewis, director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a […]

Editor’s note: The following article is one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. Cyberspace has long been seen as shifting power toward the individual, with attacks over the past decade on corporations, governments and other weighty institutions largely corroborating this view. But while the structure of cyberspace itself will always lend significant and previously unavailable advantages to individuals, we are now entering a period where governments and institutions are beginning to regain the upper hand against asymmetric cyberwarfare. In his 1996 "Declaration of the Independence […]

In June 2009, a computer worm called Stuxnet was unleashed against the nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz, Iran. Designed to infect the operating system used by the Iranians to control their nuclear centrifuges, Stuxnet significantly disrupted, and thus delayed, Iranian nuclear efforts, according to a New York Times report on Jan. 15, 2011. The Times report also provided a breathtaking peek behind the scenes of what appears to have been a large and complex covert operation to develop the Stuxnet worm. If the revelations are true, then the Stuxnet attack provides significant insights about the potential character of war by […]

The United States faces a serious but silent intellectual crisis: U.S. national security elites have separated into two tribes of specialists, technical and nontechnical, who are incapable of communicating with each other. The implications of the divide between experts in science and technology on one hand and experts in politics on the other are dangerous and far-reaching. If the United States policymaking community cannot bridge the gap between these communities, we risk making mistakes with repercussions running all the way from wasting scarce resources to war. While hardly a golden age of national security policy decision-making, the Cold War set […]

This is the second of a two-part series examining China’s telecom sector. Part I examined the domestic telecom market. Part II examines Chinese telecoms’ international expansion. SHANGHAI — Building on strong domestic development, China’s telecommunications sector has enjoyed a period of impressive international expansion over the past decade. Under the banner of the “Go Global” campaign, national flagship companies have built up their international operations through a range of overseas purchases and cooperative ventures with foreign partners. Greater technological capabilities and cost advantages have also allowed Chinese firms to rapidly establish themselves as important vendors of telecom products and services […]

This is the first of a two-part series examining China’s telecom sector. Part I examines the domestic telecom market. Part II will examine Chinese telecoms’ international expansion. SHANGHAI — In less than 20 years, the Chinese telecommunications sector has developed from a primitive government monopoly into the largest cellular and Internet communications market in the world. This change is a testament to the country’s rapid social and economic development as well as the increasing sophistication of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the industry. But with domestic markets rapidly approaching their saturation point for basic services, sustaining this growth will require deepening […]