Thread by @MattPotter

Today’s the day.

More than 20 years in the writing, my book #WeAreAllTargets is published in the USA & Canada by @HachetteUS.

In this thread, I’ll share a few things I learned about the reality of cyberwar, its weird & wonderful origins… & why it’s not what we think.

My involvement was an accident. In 2000, I was questioned by British military intelligence because NATO suspected me of spying for Serbia (I wasn’t) - because I had secret NATO Kosovo battle plans on my work computer.

MI5 came to my office.

You should have seen my boss’s face.

The odd thing was:

They came because NATO had lately noticed Rum Things Happening That Should Not Have Been.

During its bombardment of Serb forces, its missiles went where they shouldn’t. Serbs saw & downed an ‘invisible’ stealth jet. (This poster quickly appeared everywhere.)

Shipping blipped off the radar. The official White House website vanished from the internet. NATO’s own comms began malfunctioning, then croaked.

It was as if NATO’s world had become one huge Bermuda Triangle.

And of course, the hunt began for whoever the mole in NATO was.

At this point, you might know what I knew, but what the Military Intelligence chaps who questioned me seemed not to realise.

There was no mole. There were thousands of them. All over the world.

Cyberattacks we’re one thing, but the uncanny slippage of knowledge spooked them.

So here is the first takeout.

You can’t play with people then pull the plug, & expect those people to chill & move on.

Remember the Mujahideen? Armed & trained by the West in the ‘80s to resist the USSR, which fair, but then kinda ghosted?

We did that with computers too.

Only in this case, it was Silicon Valley East.

Yugoslavia. Communist, but not impressed by Soviet attempts to bully them into line.

Long story short: ‘Teach kids to code!’ is an old refrain. Yugoslavs needed 2 things:

1) A legion of future cyber resistance warriors;
2) $$$$$

Sidebar on cyber resistance. This is the bit where Parliament/Funkadelic is weirdly relevant.

WHY Yugoslavia found communism attractive has everything to do with WHY it was also weirdly fascinated with computers & robots & UFOs.

It was a patchwork of religions, countries, etc.

WW2 was doubly traumatic for that. Eg: Many Croats initially saw Germany as a potential way out of Serb dominance.

Resentment/feuds would doom it. Unless:

Communism’s promise was that none of that mattered. Old nationalisms & religions had been replaced with one smooth thing.

The Yugoslav government really went for it.

NO to old reminders of painful pasts & local origins. YES to… a futuristic outlook! New frontiers! Robots! Space!

You’ve seen Spomeniki. Yugoslav post-war memorials. Just look at them. No folk motifs. No origin clues. Pure sci-fi.

The same with education, entertainment, culture. Unlike the Soviets, they binged on Communist Party-approved Western science fiction.

2001: A Space Odyssey was a sensation.

Doctor Who became a national obsession.

The 1st Yugoslav robot pioneer formed The League of Cybermen.

It was very much like Parliament & AfroFuturism. Leave a painful past behind. Get into the Mothership.

They were also handy for the West.

And a wedge against the USSR. At one point, IBM supplied them parts they resold to the USSR to make all PCs in the Soviet Union explode.

It was mad. The Soviets sent KGB men pretending to be Miami tech buyers. The KGB agents sent photos of themselves in budgie-smuggler Speedos on Miami Beach as part of their cover.

The Yugoslav computer makers were baffled. Why would clients send photos of themselves in trunks?

High times.

Then the Cold War ended. The US funding tap went off.

A generation groomed to be high-tech heroes vs the USSR turned on itself. Nationalist hacking is a Balkan Wars innovation.

By 2000, the Balkans were the world’s laboratory for cybercrime, piracy, the lot.

And Kosovo was also a live A/B test for others to watch what happened. Russia & China watched excitedly as the biggest military alliance in history was hacked, compromised, embarrassed.

Who was doing it? What crack military division? No.

Schoolkids. Using DIY methods.

“The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to,” wrote Mark Twain.

This was that.

It was a real-life #StrangerThings.

The Serb govt, cops, army, were as surprised as anyone.

The kids had the ultimate secure comms channel. Schoolyards as chatrooms. “What if we could send US missiles off course using microwave ovens? Let’s try. Come to my house after school.”

The problem for NATO, the Pentagon, militaries, was they could not think outside of their assumptions.

My MI5 men kept looking for a spy. Not a Trojan virus.

And as for the kids themselves? The Stranger Things gangs from the forgotten margins of Europe?

They became hunted…

And not just by the US military.

Organised crime groups were keen to get in touch.

Russia’s security forces dispatched hunters. So did spy agencies elsewhere.

The law wanted them.And so did Silicon Valley itself. A new company called Google began trying to make contact.

What happened next, and where it led, is all in the book.

The result?

The internet we think we know is only half the one we think it is. Only half of it has its ancestry in the Dotcom boom, IPOs, ecommerce, Silicon Valley & the rest.

Its other parent is an Eastern Internet.

The Eastern Internet was not a commercial enterprise.

It was born as resistance tool. It matured in the shadows. It came of age in dissidence & subversion.

And to read about it is suddenly to feel the online world we have make sense.

One last thing.

The growth of cyberwar…

… from crashing planes to election interference; from Kosovo to China, is also a story of a failure of our imagination.

The generals, Silicon Valley, intelligence agencies, have been incapable of anticipating threats because they are so damn homogenous!

Uniformly educated, monocultural, white, male, top-down military-corporate minds are not great at seeing what the world might look like to those with a different experience.

(Look at Elmo.)

So the most valuable voices are often the ones excluded. If anything comes from this…

That needs to be it. I’ve included a list in the back, of people we need not just to include, but to centre.

In the meantime, people are being really kind in their reviews. Here are @MarkGaleotti @peterpomeranzev @drjessicabarker @JeffreyEStern’s takes, for which I am thankful.

OK, that’s me for now. Sorry to anyone for whom that was a long thread!

I’ll be on Reddit on Friday @ 6pm EST to do an AMA - if you come I know that at least one person will ask me something!

UK & rest of world gets it on March 14th.

If you’d like any more info, HMU! X