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Which is the most powerful cyber nation in the world? That is the research question that a smart, creative, and hard-working team from the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School seeks to answer with this innovative and intellectually illuminating study on cyber power. This is important work in both academia and the real world: the study threads the needle of providing robust academic insights in a policy-relevant model.
Executive Summary
The Belfer National Cyber Power Index (NCPI) measures 30 countries' cyber capabilities in the context of seven national objectives, using 32 intent indicators and 27 capability indicators with evidence collected from publicly available data.In contrast to existing cyber related indices, we believe there is no single measure of cyber power. Cyber Power is made up of multiple components and should be considered in the context of a country's national objectives. We take an all-of-country approach to measuring cyber power. By considering "all-of-country" we include all aspects under the control of a government where possible.
Table 1: The rankings:
1) US
2) China
3) UK
4) Russia
5) Netherlands
6) France
7) Germany
8) Canada
9) Japan
10) Australia
[...] National Cyber Power Index 2020
See also: Ranking National Cyber Power
[Note: this is one organization's assessment; others may rank things differently.--Ed.]
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @12:17AM (5 children)
Uh-huh.
US, Canada, and Aus all have expensive slow broadband netowrks, and Japan still uses largely fax machines for business, and homes with PCs are rarity.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Saturday September 12 2020, @12:45AM
There are quite a few odd things about the whole thing actually if one bothers to quickly scan it and read here and there.
They included 30 countries that have made it known to the world that they have some sort of cyber-powers. So it's almost a self selected group then. The index becomes quite weird when one looks at the countries, most of them are not on the same level so to speak. Most of them rank quite low according to their calculations except in one or another aspect but still overall low. Considering that most of the list have nothing compared to the top five it would seem almost pointless to include them. But then I suspect you can't have a list of say surveillance states without including some surveillance states. The list would look odd without their inclusion even tho their eyes are mostly looking inwards and they have little to non outwards reaching capabilities.
So it's a summation-index of seven cyber-power-objectives, page 21, and considering that a very common phrase in the paper is lack of data one is just left wondering if this is more or less just guesswork and extrapolations from public sources.
The index is a value then between 0 and 100 as per normal, even tho it should really be 0 to 1 but I guess it just looks better if you multiply by 100 -- unfortunately someone forgot so they mix and match, and according the graphs on page 12 most of the countries score quite low and it's not many points between them. So considering their lack of information the actual ranking would really be anybodies guess beyond perhaps the top spots, and then those are probably also guesses for whom actually has the top spot or not. The top value in any category is rarely more then in the 40-60 ranage. How to score the index, page 29, and a detailed explanation of each objective, page 57-60.
Also they only include national entities and not private entities so all you have to do is outsource it to the corporate world and you can fly under the radar with all your awesome cyber-powers.
(Score: 1) by fakefuck39 on Saturday September 12 2020, @12:57AM
Your criteria is not included on how "cyber power" is measured by this clown organization. it's amazing and scary china is not first based on their criteria.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @01:31AM
All well and fine for a passive study by a biased group. And then SURPRISE!!! You discover that RU and CN have far more advanced understanding of not only US-created technology / chips / internet - but HOW to apply these for subterfuge, effectively. Just look at your Social Media feeds.... Game Over.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Saturday September 12 2020, @01:42AM
With the tolerance for running software that we have no idea what it really does, we citizens of the USA, compelled by Laws passed by our own Elected Congress, to be ignorant, are sitting ducks.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 12 2020, @03:06AM
Broadband and g5 penetration is a proxy for consumer social media and video streaming demand, nothing more. Winning the "Facebook war" or "Netflix war" is like using gun ownership as a proxy for a country's military might. Nukes, ICBMs, spy satellites aircraft carriers, submarines are more relevant, even though consumers don't have them.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @12:52AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy40xASCl00 [youtube.com]
The most advanced military-industrial nation on the earth is the most advanced, 'cyber power,' on earth. Who'd have guessed...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fakefuck39 on Saturday September 12 2020, @01:01AM (17 children)
Surveilling and Monitoring Domestic Groups;
Strengthening and Enhancing National Cyber Defenses;
Controlling and Manipulating the Information Environment;
Foreign Intelligence Collection for National Security;
Commercial Gain or Enhancing Domestic Industry Growth;
Destroying or Disabling an Adversary’s Infrastructure and Capabilities; and,
Defining International Cyber Norms and Technical Standards.
not capacity, not speed, not prices, not availability. cyber power here is defined at how much the government has control over anything computer-related. note 3 for example.
so, countries that have privacy laws, don't filter the information you read, don't censor based on politics - they lose on this rating. it's a rating of how much the government oppresses people online. The higher the worse your country is. The results are of course as expected. What's not expected is this american organization (looks like part of harvard) is spewing propaganda. if you're not on this list - good. if you're high on this list - bad.
we're #1.
(Score: 3, Funny) by NickM on Saturday September 12 2020, @01:43AM (6 children)
What did you expect?
It's an index of cyber-power. As power corrupts. It's an index of cyber-corruption.
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 1) by fakefuck39 on Saturday September 12 2020, @02:37AM (5 children)
given that this is coming out of Harvard, I would expect "cyber power" to mean "how powerful the country's computers and interconnects are." kinda how when I say how much electrical power do you have, you tell me in watts/volts/amps, instead of saying "i can shut down my whole neighborhood by blowing up the city transformers."
what they mean by "cyber power" here is "government control over cyber systems." so again - very weird to see this coming out of Harvard.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday September 12 2020, @02:51AM (2 children)
Well, Harvard is a very political institution, or it wouldn't be so admired by politicians.
And they are extremely rare. Is there one that has all three of those things?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by NickM on Saturday September 12 2020, @03:14AM
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 1) by fakefuck39 on Saturday September 12 2020, @03:58AM
I think we have a miscommunication. This is just about the only country where the 3 branches are "government." When speaking about the world, "government" would mean congress and the executive. The legal system is not government.
So given that, most of EU falls into this category. NSA spying type of stuff is not done a lot over there, and any time it comes out, the legal system fights the government and politicians on behalf of the people. Now, they do censor information - the individual's bullshit "right to be forgotten." But that is not the government censoring information. It's the government providing a person a tool against the corporations - the government itself is not censoring things they don't want you to see. When I say EU, I of course don't mean UK.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday September 12 2020, @03:13AM (1 child)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fakefuck39 on Saturday September 12 2020, @04:02AM
"power" - yes. "compute power" and "electrIc power" - of course not. you're havIng trouble with thIs EnglIsh thIng a lot. you are agaIn completely wrong about things that are common knowledge, mr "Cisco iOS."
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday September 12 2020, @03:28AM (8 children)
note, too, that the countries in the top 10 are also the ones who have proposed, tested, or deployed '"Great Firewalls"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday September 12 2020, @04:01AM (7 children)
I am a Canadian in Canada. I don't remember hearing about the Canadian Great Firewall. Could someone enlighten me?
-- hendrik
(Score: 3, Informative) by fakefuck39 on Saturday September 12 2020, @04:09AM (6 children)
You wouldn't exactly know about it if you don't know the sites exist. You have to know something exists to try to access it and be blocked.
Yes, you've had one for a long long time. It's called CleanFeed, and every single one of your ISPs joined it I think around 2005. "But it's for a good cause" was your government's excuse. It was rolled out in UK as well. That's the same excuse China uses btw.
That's the one I know of, there may be others.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday September 12 2020, @10:18AM
government control is slightly obfuscated in the UK [wikipedia.org]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Saturday September 12 2020, @01:04PM (4 children)
Thank you. I looked up cleanfeed on Google and found its Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] and also an interesting article on censorship in Canada [wikipedia.org].
This is what is had to say about internet censorship here:
So it looks as if it's not the Canadian government that imposes Cleanfeed on ISPs. Some independent ISPs even not participate. I'll have to look into it.
The situation with Telus was also an ISP initiative. The union complained it was a union-busting tactic, and ended up being widely denounced.
The real, official internet censorship in Canada is a prohibition on child pornography, and a prohibition on hate speech (defined as knowingly publishing false news with the purpose of promoting hatred of an identifiable group ...)
But that is not specific to the internet, and is handled by court cases against the person posting the false news, not by merely shutting off the content. Such court cases tend to be widely reported, leading to a kind of Streisand effect.
Such cases are also difficult to prosecute; the bar is high; it is necessary to establish "knowingly", falsehood, and purpose.
It looks as if, except for hate speech and child pornography, censorship in Canada is unofficial and easily bypassed.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @01:36PM
Probably similar to the filter we have which is purely DNS based. It was introduced in a volunteer coorporation between Save the Children and the ISPs, but once the filter was there *big surprise* it was a technical capability that the anti-pirate lawyers soon enough got a courts order could be used to block those evil file sharing sites. I haven't head of it being used for much else, but anyone strong enough to withstand the shit they might discover could probe the DNS filter and compile a list of blocked domains. It is just a DNS filter, not really a "great" firewall.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @04:48PM (1 child)
false as decided by the Jews that control the courts. The same Jews who got that law passed in the first place. scroogle arthur zundel.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday September 13 2020, @02:58AM
Arthur? Nor Ernst?
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Saturday September 12 2020, @11:15PM
cleanfeed does not appear to be government-sponsored. so it's corporations which were given a monopoly by the government to providing internet service, digging cable under public land, allowed to censor whatever they want. it's a stretch to "government censorship" but it is government-enabled censorship. see, either an ISP is a common carrier and not responsible for traffic, or I can sue them for every packet someone passes on their network. it's the government that lets them have common carrier status, while clearly breaking what defines a common carrier. it's the selective enforcement of regulations that lets the ISP censor.
Now as far as the court - that is absolutely china-style censorship. It's easy to bypass in china too - use a vpn. Child porn? Well in my opinion, a drawn cartoon of child porn is not child porn. Nor should having real child porn be illegal. You are in no way involved of a child being fucked by downloading a video. the person fucking the child is the only one who is a criminal here. yet both having cartoons and downloading of photos and drawn cartoons are illegal, will send you to jail, and are censored by the government. this is authoritarian censorship, just like in china.
as far as hate speech being blocked.. i fully support all forms of hate speech, and no one gets to define what hate speech is. we just had a person steal a hat who was charged with a hate crime. anything said against violent criminals now is hate speech if they're black. you either have freedom of speech - any speech - or you don't have it. and if you don't have it - and canada does not, you are guilty of the same crime as china, just to a lesser degree. having someone do the bad thing worse doesn't make your bad thing better.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Saturday September 12 2020, @07:51AM
Then again, they didn't even evaluate that correctly. Estonia, in the wake of the Bronze Soldier riots back in the 2000s, defended itself against a concerted "cyber" attack from one of the biggest, most evil by most standards, state level actors in the world (the bear to the east). Yet does it get a high score? Tish, pish. I think we have the highest e-Voting participation rate in the world too, and our voting systems are frequently reviewed and audited by international third parties (OK, we don't always get a clean bill of health, but all the realistic threats reported have been addressed swiftly), and the amount of officia that can be performed at home just using your ID card is incredible - I file my tax report, approve my company accounts, sign share distribution agreements, and bloody everything nowadays. We're one of the most cyber countries in the world. One of the benefits of having to reinvent yourself from scratch in the 1990s, and we had a great neighbour up north to use as a starting point.
Adding scores that measure fundamentally different things is almost always a way of generating noise as the output, and this seems no different. However, it seems like it's by design, as there are plenty of signs that there's no interest in clear comminication of coherent concepts throughout the whole document.
E.g. Use of utterly misleading 'starburst'-like charts (invented by graphics designers to look cool, and mislead the viewer, ditto spider charts for that matter); repeated confusion between the value being measured and the method of representing that value (a "decimal" is not a type of value, it's a way of rending a value, and 99.9% is certainly a percentage represented as a decimal, yet they think that the way to represent the percentage 99.9% as a decimal is as follows: 0.999); and general poor English, sloppy paragraph structure, and even meaningless non-sentences dotted around the place which tells me nobody actually read the thing for comprehension before publishing. Even worse, the fact that this was limited to ~30 countries, with some very technically adept countries absent from the list (e.g. Finland), makes this study almost worthless.
And of course, we mustn't forget the general utilisation of both meaningless factual numbers (e.g. number of social media users, participation in standards bodies, number of patents) as inputs, and even pulling some inputs out of their fat hairy asses (the subjective opinion based ones, of which there are many).
So probably "worse than useless" would be accurate.
On my scale, that is, which ranges from "infinitely bad" to "infinitely good", and has a cauchy distribution, and I can plot a starburst chart to prove that, so it must be right.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tangaroa on Saturday September 12 2020, @03:19AM (4 children)
(Score: 1) by fakefuck39 on Saturday September 12 2020, @04:16AM
you seem to be confused between the words "unimportant battle we didn't care about or devote resources to" and "cyber war." The US can literally shut off Qatar's link to the internet if we wanted, like we do for North Korea. Smaller websites no one knows about got hacked so you say "US loses cyber war." That's cute. This happens every day because of bored teenagers. Word never got out because no one had word about those smaller websites in the first place.
I guess by your definition though, the US loses a cyber war against ugly incels in highschool on a daily basis.
It's weird. There are some people here who twist shit to such a ridiculous point, and they truly believe their logic - it has to be an actual mental illness or something. Or are you same autistic dude making all these posts under several accounts? I do really want to know, for my entertainment.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday September 12 2020, @09:30AM (2 children)
> lost badly
I think "lost badly" would mean, in this context, major economic damage (e.g. Google or Amazon going down) or major infrastructure damage (e.g. illicit access to utilities). Did that happen? Or something similar?
(Score: 2) by Tangaroa on Saturday September 12 2020, @03:42PM (1 child)
Google was actively helping them through a Jigsaw project and Amazon [clarionproject.org] joined them. There's no need to take down a business if you're running it.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday September 13 2020, @07:17PM
Lol.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday September 12 2020, @10:30AM
What's a Cyber Power?
https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Cyberpower [wikia.org]
https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/digital-divide-social-equity/6614 [igi-global.com]
Well, I am Cyber Power! What about you?
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design