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Author : Ye. Rogowsky
Candidate of Science (Economics), leading expert, Center for International Information Security and Sci-
entific and Technological Policy, Moscow State Institute (University) of International Relations, Ministry
of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Candidate of Science (Economics)
UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, it had been a general
mantra in the United States that it was wrong to put
any restrictions on the Internet or bring it under any
control. Silicon Valley innovators who designed social
network platforms didn't worry too much about how
the latter might be used. They planned to organize
online communities where members would have fa-
cilities for comfortable intercommunication and
trade. They had in mind conflict-free, purely progres-
sive development of U.S. digital society and assumed
that their designs were far ahead of the resources of terrorists.
But the Internet hasn't simply grown since it came into being a few decades ago. It has become
a conflict zone. Today's cyberspace is a site for fierce economic competition, for ideological
struggles, and for measures against foreign cyber aggression, terrorism, and the theft of intel-
lectual property and personal data. All this is a stark contrast to the former use of online networks
solely by scientific and scholarly communities.
Politicians and the military in the United States have come to realize that there's a whole gamut
of ways in which the Internet can be used against American interests.
When terrorists got hold of technologies that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was
powerless to counteract, President Barack Obama urged Silicon Valley innovators to think up
ways to prevent terrorists from using social networks for the radicalization of U.S. society and
recruitment, in order to stop them from using modern technology against American interests.
The innovative technologies that caused the greatest annoyance to Clinton and Obama were not
Russian but American, used by American citizens on U.S. territory.
Internet search engines that are outside public control may pose serious hazards, which should
undoubtedly be qualified as information security threats.
The Obama administration set itself the goal of preventing the use of the global information
infrastructure against American interests but failed to achieve it. Now not only WikiLeaks and
the Chinese but also commercial actors were alleged to be menaces to the United States, and the
country's information insecurity assumed truly geopolitical proportions.
DONALD TRUMP drew his online support from the Facebook company and the Center for
Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC), organizations that had an election campaign strategy based
on commercial principles and hence was fundamentally different from that of the Clinton team.
Trump knew how to use Twitter but was against all kinds of new electronic gadgets. But tweeting
The U.S. Presidential Election: A Triumph of Information Tech-
nology Innovations