The Digital Maginot Line (2018)

> Like the original Maginot Line, this approach is about as effective a defense as a minor speed bump.

No

The Maginot Line forced the german army to go through the ardennes. It bunched up all their forces into a tiny crossing surrounded by valleys rivers and other such obstacle.

Two french spotter planes saw this and reported back. The report was regarded as spurious.

Had the report been acted on, the invasion of france probably would have failed.

France and britian had by far the best kit and numbers. However the french were in disarray politically, and the british weren't really integrating properly.

So the real reason barrier was the lack of joined up political thinking.

Ah yes, this is Venkatesh Rao's site, who is some kind of "futurist".

It's the wrong metaphor. The Maginot line was supposedly impenetrable for keeping clearly labelled troops on the other side. The modern situation is something much more porous, much more like Cold War (counter)intelligence. Or this discussion of "interpretative superiority": http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2018/02/18/why-corbyn-is-th... (although I disagree with the conclusion). A system that can detect ideological incursions, vector an intercept response, and shoot down memes that get over the line. Analogy between forum moderation and those Phalanx CIWS systems for shooting down missiles.

The West doesn't have a central ideological defence system though, or at least not since the Cold War. Instead it's more like an immune system. Individual agents wander around the body politic attacking ideas they find unfamiliar. Responses to ideological challenge happen not through central coordination but by the actions of individual and factions.

The effectiveness of this system has become an autoimmune disease that can be exploited by pathogenic actors. The US police are a good example of this: their ideological defence is so strong it can cover even crimes committed in broad daylight on video.

(a) I have former-Yugoslav colleagues who believe that "Information Wars" were already at work last century.

(b) in Maginot's defence, junior french planners may well have imagined a Blitzkrieg, and rightfully discarded it, assuming the germans wouldn't have an energy source. A coal-based army doesn't move quickly.

The french were to learn that a synfuel-based[1] army can blitz. The germans, on the other hand, had to blitz: after failing[2] to reach Grozny and Baku to replenish energy stocks they were put on the defensive.

Crude Rules Everything Around Me

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergius_process

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad#Prelude

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Motherland_Calls#/media/Fi...

https://books.google.ch/books?id=6_h3DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA85&lpg=PA...

> Ardennes, it turned out, was not impenetrable. Moving through the forest would perhaps have been a futile effort for an army using the attrition warfare strategies prevalent in World War I, but it was vulnerable to new modes of warfare. As the French focused on building the Maginot Line, the Germans developed exactly such a new model of warfare — Blitzkrieg —and sent a million men and 1500 tanks through Ardennes (while deploying a small force to the Maginot Line as a decoy).

While not outright false, this isn't exactly true. Ardennes' forest was in fact near impenetrable, but the Germans took the road. It would have been more than feasible to stop them while on that road, but before a decision could be made as to attack them there, they were through and it was too late.

The débâcle had many causes but the major one was a failure of thinking. In 1938 an important French general, Louis Chauvineau, wrote a book called "Is an invasion still possible?" in which he, of course, answered by the negative. The book enjoyed a modicum of success and had a reprint in... 1940: it was still in bookshops in France when Hitler was parading in front of the Eiffel tower.

Beware of experts.

After reading this it occurs to me that a key aspect of the real world that is missing in the digital variant is identity. When people believe they cannot be seen they are prone to doing things that they might not otherwise do. If one needed a licence to drive on the information highway where digital-traffic violations had fines and/or jail terms, things might be different.

Sounds un-workable? Perhaps. But there was time when anyone could drive an animal powered vehicle with no certification. Once transportation technology became too powerful regulation had to follow to prevent chaos. How different is the current situation? Why does the local radio station, with 5 KW transmitter, need a FEDERAL license but Facebook and Twitter do not? Political leaders in the early 20th century seemed to understand the power of electronic media and did not shirk their responsibility to manage the society they found themselves in.

I am of the opinion that the current flock of political leaders, many of whom were born before the micro-computer existed are incapable of drafting the appropriate balanced language for this century. It will therefore fall on those born in the digital era to figure it out but the speed of digital change means we are already late and damage will be done before solutions exist.

This article isn't worth the time. TL;DR: A lot of digital ink was spilt about a digital Maginot line, but skimps out on spilling ink for the solution

> The solution to this problem requires collective responsibility among military, intelligence, law enforcement, researchers, educators, and platforms. Creating a new and functional defensive framework requires cooperation.

So the solution is that we must work together, starting with the military? Is there something actionable here?

> It’s time to prioritize frameworks for multi-stakeholder threat information sharing and oversight. The government has the ability to create meaningful deterrence, to make it an unquestionably bad idea to interfere in American democracy and manipulate American citizens.

What deterrence are you proposing? The kinetic kind?

> It can revamp national defense doctrine to properly contextualize the threat of modern information operations, and create a whole-of-government approach that’s robust regardless of any new adversary, platform, or technology that emerges. And it can communicate threat intelligence to tech companies.

And that's it? Reading the content from think tanks at least put out something more substantial.

The France's "Maginot Line" is used here as a metaphor to ground the author's idea--increasing stories of security breaches and disruptive cyber-terrorist acts are visible signs of the top-down dark state.

Ok. And on the other hand, technology is integrated into society. Technologists (private actors, employees) will see opportunities and vulnerabilities, and make black/white hat choices (like in finance?). And, sprawling organizations with unaccountable funds and charismatic managers will form groups (sounds like an interesting job and more fun than, you know, work) and possibly do some unethical $#it and hide behind lawyers and money. //End dialectical rant

Nicely written, though.

> There is a war happening. We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality.

Cite maybe? Like what is this even referring to? Some level of specificity would be great.

In the first couple paragraphs, he says that the Cold War involved shadowboxing (it involved numerous medium sized wars, just not WW3) and that the Maginot Line was ineffective (it was quite effective, that's why the Germans went through the forest to get around it). I stopped reading.

(2018)