The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones-Confronting A New Age of Threat

by Benjamin Wittes, Gabriella Blum

Overview

Two legal scholars explore the security and political implications of revolutionary new technologies from drones to 3-D printers, and explain how governments must adapt to our brave new world of dispersed threats.

From drone warfare in the Middle East to digital spying by the National Security Agency, the U.S. government has harnessed the power of cutting-edge technology to awesome effect. But what happens when ordinary people have the same tools at their fingertips? Advances in cybertechnology, biotechnology, and robotics mean that more people than ever before have access to potentially dangerous technologies-from drones to computer networks and biological agents-which could be used to attack states and private citizens alike.

In The Future of Violence, law and security experts Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum detail the myriad possibilities, challenges, and enormous risks present in the modern world, and argue that if our national governments can no longer adequately protect us from harm, they will lose their legitimacy. Consequently, governments, companies, and citizens must rethink their security efforts to protect lives and liberty. In this brave new world where many little brothers are as menacing as any Big Brother, safeguarding our liberty and privacy may require strong domestic and international surveillance and regulatory controls. Maintaining security in this world where anyone can attack anyone requires a global perspective, with more multinational forces and greater action to protect (and protect against) weaker states who do not yet have the capability to police their own people. Drawing on political thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to the Founders and beyond, Wittes and Blum show that, despite recent protestations to the contrary, security and liberty are mutually supportive, and that we must embrace one to ensure the other.

The Future of Violence is at once an introduction to our emerging world -- one in which students can print guns with 3-D printers and scientists' manipulations of viruses can be recreated and unleashed by ordinary people -- and an authoritative blueprint for how government must adapt in order to survive and protect us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465056705
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	03/10/2015
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	597 KB

About the Author

Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and the editor-in-chief of Lawfare. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Gabriella Blum is the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

PART I
1. The Distribution of Offensive Capability
2. The Distribution of Vulnerability
3. The Distribution of Defense

PART II
4. Technology, States, and the Social Order
5. Rethinking Privacy, Liberty, and Security
6. Rethinking Legal Jurisdiction and the Boundaries of Sovereignty

PART III
7. The Security of Platforms and the Future of Surveillance
8. Options for Domestic Governance
9. Options for International Governance

Editorial Reviews

"A book that manages to meld Hobbes, James Bond, science fiction, and Supreme Court decisions is a rare read. All the more impressive when it takes a complex set of urgent questions about the intersection of technology, security, and liberty, and offers insights and at least the beginnings of answers. Violence will be always with us, but its forms are changing in ways that challenge our ability to respond to and regulate it."—Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO of New America

"Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum have written a compelling and provocative book about an important topic we have not adequately faced: managing catastrophic risk in a technologically advanced society. I strongly recommend this book even for people who will not agree with the authors' conclusions."—ruce Schneier, author of Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

"What the authors achieve in this work is to raise the profile of issues at the intersection of biology, technology, and government policy.... Recommended to readers of governmental policy and the ethics of technology, who will be especially interested in this timely work."—Library Journal

"Citing Hobbes Locke, and Weber, the authors offer an impressive analysis of how the state will need to change to counter these threats. Publishers are competing to put out increasingly dire warnings about the fast-changing threats from cyber attacks, but The Future of Violence is original and insightful in turning to political theory for answers."—Financial Times

"A lively and often terrifying exploration of the dark side of our technological age."—Washington Post

"A careful, sophisticated analysis...In discussing how to combat [cybercrimes], the authors transcend clichés about tradeoffs between liberty and security, patiently explaining how without security, there is rarely much liberty."—Foreign Affairs

"An alarming and informative new book.... The Future of Violence is a frightening book, but it's not an exercise in fear-mongering. Rather than arousing fear in order to advocate some dogmatic ideological agenda, Wittes and Blum offer a good example of a productive response to the world's multiplying horrors: thoughtful and realistic analysis of potential solutions.—Daily Beast

From the Publisher

02/01/2015
Wittes (senior fellow, governance studies, Brookings Institution; Campaign 2012) and Blum (Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Harvard Law Sch.; Islands of Agreement), who codirect the Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security, introduce readers to the new and upcoming threats to security, privacy, and health in the 21st century, which are often enabled by low-cost, advanced technology. With ready access to drone technology, nano-tech, and biological tools and information, these threats are situated in a political economy of the role of the state, private citizens, and nonstate actors. What Wittes and Blum set out to do is provide instructive possible actions that government may be poised to take, and others in which government players may not yet have ample guidelines to address. A case in point revolves around civilian drone use by political activists for environmental monitoring. What the authors achieve in this work is to raise the profile of issues at the intersection of biology, technology, and government policy. Posing the challenges to safety now, before the technologies have matured, will give law and policymakers a head start on some of the issues they raise, while others—such as health monitoring of virulent diseases—have already made waves globally. VERDICT Recommended to readers of governmental policy and the ethics of technology, who will be especially interested in this timely work.—Jim Hahn, Univ. Lib., Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

Library Journal

2014-12-27
Ambitious yet dry treatise regarding a particular terror of modern life: the increasing ubiquity of potential harm spawned by technological transformations. Brookings Institution senior fellow Wittes and Blum (Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law/Harvard Law School; Islands of Agreement: Managing Enduring Armed Rivalries, 2007, etc.) begin by articulating the many ways in which our fundamental connectedness, along with related advances in computing, biotechnology, 3-D printing, gene synthesis and other awe-inspiring technologies, could easily go awry or be turned to evil ends by lone sociopaths or wannabe jihadi: "Technologies that put destructive power traditionally confined to states in the hands of small groups and individuals have proliferated remarkably far," write the authors. They initially focus on the destructive possibilities of technologies that have quickly become familiar, hypothesizing, for example, that ordinary people will soon be able to harass their rivals with tiny drones. In our transformative moment, "distance does not protect you…you are at once a figure of great power and great vulnerability." Yet much of the authors' discussion focuses on the changing nature of the state itself, weighing Hobbes' concept of the "Leviathan" in the face of new and diverse threats. They first focus on how technology has "distributed" both vulnerability and the capacity to cause harm widely: "[W]e live in a fishbowl even as we exploit the fact that others live in a fishbowl too," a principle embodied by recent "sextortion" cases. This inevitably forces a reconsideration of privacy and liberty on many levels, as revealed by events ranging from the Boston Marathon bombing investigation to hacker attacks on Israel and Iran. The authors raise fascinating questions but discuss them utilizing a formal legalistic framework. Ironically, they illuminate the coming age of "many-to-many" threats via a language few laypeople will find comprehensible. A thoughtful yet obscure Cassandra warning of great vulnerabilities disguised as gifts.

Kirkus Reviews