Читать книгу The Digital Big Bang - Phil Quade - Страница 52

Human knowledge of geography often informs an understanding or sense of how things move from one place to another and how authorities for various activities are allocated across vast stretches of geography. What schoolchild has not memorized the axiom that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line? However comforting the thought, cyberspace is only vaguely aware of the rule, finding it inefficient to blindly route communications around the globe based solely on the physical distances involved. To wit, an email being sent from New York to San Francisco in the middle of an American workday will compete for bandwidth with the massive flows attendant to financial trades and transfers, logistical coordination among shippers and suppliers, personal communications, and even the latest YouTube craze-du-jour of cats playing pianos, and might be sent from New York to San Francisco through other countries.

Software running on the millions of computers controlling the storage devices and pathways of cyberspace constantly senses the status of various routes, sometimes sending communications around the planet on pathways that are underutilized to arrive at a destination only miles away in the shortest time possible. Not understanding the informal but influential rules that inform cyberspace routing means users may be forever surprised at the paths their communications take and where they may actually reside while being stored until the owner accesses them. In most cases, this counterintuitive phenomenon represents a user-preferred feature, in that the details of routing and storage are handled automatically without requiring the user to master and direct complex aspects of technology, communication routes, and traffic flows. But the downside is obvious for users who assume that their data is safe from prying eyes or other risks because it is stored or routed through technologies and routes that are wholly within the users' field of view.

Experience in the geography layer also informs a sense of who is responsible for what. Cyberspace cannot ignore the reality that laws, policies, and treaties that govern human affairs are almost always tied to geography. This reality becomes particularly challenging when trying to sort out which laws pertain to property that is shared across countries or, more significantly, what jurisdiction pertains to an activity that crosses space and time in milliseconds, only to take a different route seconds later.

A case in point helps to illustrate this challenge. If a person in country A (for instance, the imaginary nation of Inglisia) hacks into a computer in country B (the imaginary country of Quadeland) and uses that hacked machine to attack computers in a third country (the United States), then which laws and property rights pertain? Can the victim who owns the US-based machine reach out and hack back at the machine in Quadeland? If so, do the laws of the United States or Quadeland apply? What if the victim is a resident of a fourth country? In this way, rules based on geography quickly break down and require a model that allows users to work across borders, a model that must satisfy the highest common denominator of the expectations of privacy, due diligence, and other user expectations embodied in the laws of the various jurisdictions. The issue of jurisdiction in cyberspace is only now being reconciled to the physical (based on geography) and practical (how it really works) realities of cyberspace.