The latest revelations about the cooperation between the US and Danish secret services in wiretapping top international politicians have made it clear that the establishment of hegemonic power structures in cyberspace has long been in full swing. Experts agree: enormous efforts and close cooperation are necessary if the global community wants to hold its own against the attacks by cyber powers like the United States on data security and against the increasing monopoly of American Internet companies.
At the end of May, explosive new details came to light that made it clear that the surveillance affair surrounding the US secret service NSA did not end after the revelations of Edward Snowden in 2013. In the following years, his former employer spied on high-ranking European politicians and did not stop at the state representatives of immediate allies. In its espionage activities, the NSA was able to benefit from the support of the Danish foreign and military intelligence service FE (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste), as a research alliance of various European media recently reported.
As part of this precarious cooperation, the Danish secret service made it possible to tap German top politicians such as Angela Merkel or Peer Steinbrück, but also Danish politicians and other key players. At the latest, these most recent revelations in the context of the espionage affair, which have been going on for years, make it clear that the United States is making every effort to consolidate its supremacy in cyberspace. And scenarios of future cyber wars seem to be much more than just inspiration for sci-fi book and film material.
The danger of US attacks on global data security also puts international security experts on a high alert. A symposium of the United Nations Human Rights Council recently focused intensively on the conformity of US wiretapping behavior with national and international jurisprudence, and with the global community’s ability to defend itself against the consolidation of US cyber hegemony .
In addition to the systematic spying of their own allies, the advocates of global data security and privacy are also giving cause for concern about the increasing monopoly of American Internet companies in Europe and beyond. Appreciated years ago for their transformative and liberal ideas, internet platforms such as Google or Facebook, but also large corporations such as Microsoft and Apple, have built up a huge supremacy over time. With their monopoly efforts, they developed in their respective industries from sponsors to obstacles to progress and innovation and thus increasingly robbed local companies of their development opportunities. They also increasingly pose a significant threat to data security and privacy.
Above all, Facebook and Google have created strategies and structures to achieve the mammoth global share of digital advertising income by controlling and manipulating the attention of their users and artificially provoking addictive behavior. In this way, they bind users and content to their platforms in the long term and steer them reliably in the direction of their commercial interests. But beyond that, the corporate giants, as Internet platforms, have an unbelievable power potential to control the attention and information consumption of their users and thus rob them of their intellectual independence.
The likely irreversible consequences for global data security and privacy would be hard to imagine if global internet platforms such as Facebook and Google, with their monopoly efforts and their practically irrepressible options for monitoring communications and attention control, would cooperate with the existing surveillance organs of state secret services.
In order to defend itself against the dominance of the United States as the hegemonic power of the cyber world in Europe as well, resolute action and a powerful strategy by the European community seem indispensable. The protection of data security and privacy enjoys a much higher priority in the European Union and is treated with greater foresight. EU case law places the protection of workers and citizens, as well as their privacy and data security much more central and is also far more committed to restricting monopolar structures than is the case in the United States.
Above all, the implementation of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018 clearly focuses on principles such as transparency, timeliness, temporality and secure storage of personal data. It also gives citizens the right to request the deletion of their data, and counters the failure to consider their lines of light with heavy penalties. The United States, where the interests of citizens in safeguarding privacy and data security falls within the remit of various federal and state bodies, is a long way from having such a central and clear legal framework as the GDPR.
In order to preserve the precious security and privacy of the European community as far as possible and to put a stop to the cyber-hegemonic drive for power of the United States, it seems of the utmost importance for the European community to further expand the existing infrastructure for the regulation and control of the cyber world in close cooperation and thereby also to curb the supremacy of the central American Internet companies. If this does not succeed, fictional sci-fi scenarios of today could become bitter reality in the near future.
