Opening and Securing the Digital Frontiers
The Scottish Government needs to start talking about “real security” - one way it can start practicing it is by making it easier for Scottish public bodies, private companies and individuals to start using open source software instead of software that can be compromised or shut down by the US President.
Image Source: Unsplash
You’re standing in line to buy lunch when you notice the commotion at the front of the queue. People are having trouble paying for their meal. Phone apps aren’t working. Neither are visa cards. No-one carries cash any more, so that’s not an option. You check your phone to see if you can find out if something is on the news. You can’t search because Google keeps throwing up a message saying that it has been geoblocked in the UK. Your Android phone is refusing to open most of your apps. The person next to you finds that their iPhone has been bricked completely.
You go back to the office hungry to find that it is in chaos too. Your colleagues’ Teams meetings all simultaneously cut off mid-call. You can’t access your company files on the cloud drive. Then the high-speed Starlink internet connection goes down. Even your word processor stops working. The one computer in the building still working normally is the IT tech’s Linux laptop. The office is closed but it takes you longer than normal to drive home – your satnav isn’t working and nor is anyone else’s so getting through the diversions caused by roadworks is a nightmare.
News filters out only very slowly – Youtube is down for you too as are most of your social media platforms – but you eventually hear that the President-for-Life of the United States is unhappy with being refused a fourth state visit to the UK and issued an executive order telling all US companies to stop providing digital services to the UK. Given that this was just a week after a major digital conference where the bosses of those companies showered the President with golden gifts and gilded platitudes, almost all of them complied immediately. The few that didn’t would come to feel his wrath over the coming days.
A few years ago, that would be a summary of a dystopian, cyberpunk thriller. It certainly wouldn’t be considered in any way to be credible real-world geopolitics. The US might cut Russia off from the global banking payments systems, but not the UK. There’s no way that megacorporations with global outreach and customers would pay fealty to one man over their global customer base and shareholders.
And yet, they do. They always do. The US is the home base for even the largest tech companies and that means that they are vulnerable to the man who can order them to be shut down. This is why capitalists ALWAYS favour authoritarians over democracy. If the King has you at his mercy; he wins. Just ask Elon Musk. He can get away with shutting Ukraine out of Starlink to prove a point, but when he threatened to pull SpaceX out of NASA – a move that would have virtually locked the US out of space – it didn’t take more than a few hours for him to back down.
I’m not even talking about the current President (or, at least, not JUST him) because Trump has set precedents that can’t be unset and may be used by any sufficiently motivated future President. The fact that it is now even remotely possible for the President of the US to cast into the dark any country reliant on US tech should be considered a major security concern. Just because he hasn’t threatened to invade and annex the UK like he has other NATO members Canada and Greenland doesn’t reduce that threat.
The Scottish Government really must start factoring this kind of risk into its operations. A decade ago we published a policy paper by digital rights campaigner Alistair Davidson on how Government digital policies should adapt in the age of ubiquitous surveillance. In that paper, he essentially argued that we must assume that the US and UK are able to hack or insert back doors into software produced by companies they control – we can see that manifest today in areas like their fight to insert such backdoors into encrypted communications software like WhatsApp (the visible manifestations of where they are struggling to do this being merely the surface ripples indicating the places where they have been silently successful) and so we should use open source software instead to secure ourselves against the spying of even our ostensible allies.
Today’s digital front line isn’t just about surveillance though but about shaping and controlling the battlefield itself. Rather than ‘merely’ using digital platforms to spy on Scottish public bodies and people, we now live in a world where there exists the threat of the US simply denying us access to those platforms.
“Bluesky now might be a bit nicer than the hellscape that is X but it’s no less vulnerable to capture than Twitter was”
Alternatives already exist. The world of Open Source software is now mature enough that other Governments like Brazil and, more recently, Germany and Denmark have started using them to the exclusion of the products under US Government control. Scotland should follow. The Scottish Government should mandate that all public sector services must prepare to transition to open source software as soon as possible. Even if they don’t believe the security threats, the cost savings on licences for software like Windows, Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Cloud and others would be considerable. Outwith Government, open source alternatives to vulnerable software should be encouraged in everything from supporting companies to transition to open source software – perhaps even commissioning secure software like a bespoke Scottish flavour of Linux? The Government should also provide the training packages required for people and companies to make the switch and set up repositories of open source alternatives to vulnerable software.
They could encourage the use of decentralised social media platforms for peer-to-peer communication Bluesky now might be a bit nicer than the hellscape that is X but it’s no less vulnerable to capture than Twitter was. Federated platforms like Mastodon (you can find me at mastodon.scot/@thecommongreen) offer the capability of providing local hosts that America can’t touch or even the means for individuals to self-host and control their own social media platform themselves without losing the ability to talk to their friends.
Hardware will be harder (it would likely take decades to spin up the kind of manufacturing sector required to secure ourselves against Trump banning Nvidia from selling us chips – which means that the second best time to start building might be now) but we’ll need to look at that too. Maybe next time we do Silicon Glen, we’ll do it properly, without seeing the companies flee the moment the tax breaks end.
This doesn’t need to be a purely defensive move either. Not long ago, I advocated that the Scottish Government should adopt a strategy from Cory Doctorow that said that the next time Trump starts threatening Scotland with trade sanctions for some real or perceived slight, then we could launch a Scottish app store that undercuts the 30% commission paid to Apple or Google every time you buy an app there, we could use devolved “Crown Use” powers to override patents on digital technologies that lock people out of being able to repair or modify their tech and could go so far as providing jailbreaking kits so that people can get access to make those repairs.
Scotland is in the midst of a fierce debate about Land Reform now. Many of us are sick of the Lairds who have controlled what we do with the land under our feet. The land of the Digital Commons is no different – having been enclosed and corralled by a few tech-Lairds currently in feu to a capricious King-Over-The-Pond. It will be harder for Scotland to drive the global changes needed to reverse this but we can at least do what we can to make things safer, more secure and cheaper for people here.
What we need now is that first step and to take it, I’m asking for an MSP – from any party – in the Scottish Parliament to take this on as a project. I’m asking you to lobby the Government for an Open Source Bill – or to bring one forward as a Member’s Bill – to start this kind of transition. In a world where Keir Starmer wants to build more nuclear weapons and Donald Trump wants to unleash his Department of War against his allies, it’s time for Scotland to start discussing real security and what that means for people living here.
