Suchergebnisse

The Soviet understanding of war -- Soviet military science -- The cause of war -- The nature of war -- War as an instrument of politics -- Evgeny Messner -- Conclusion -- The Russian understanding of war after the dissolution of the Soviet Union -- The 1990s : continuity -- The 2000s : confusion -- The 2010s : change -- Conclusion -- Information warfare -- The information security doctrines -- Information-technical warfare -- Information-psychological warfare -- Conclusion -- Colour revolutions -- The political view -- The military view -- Conclusion -- Conclusion -- Policy implications.

The COVID-19 pandemic, besides triggering the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, is accelerating technological trends that were well in the making before its outbreak. The Great Lockdown exposed the digital divide between frontier and non-frontier firms, with the former group being able to provide services and goods no longer available within traditional markets. The growing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few global digital companies will shape global and domestic politics in the immediate future. Globally, the pandemic has increased geopolitical rivalry and underlined the decline of the US as a superpower. At the same time, it has highlighted the fact that geopolitical confrontation is increasingly taking place in the digital domain and among private companies. The information space has been overloaded by an 'infodemic' and cyberattacks directed at hospitals, research institutes and universities have soared in the race to discover and market a vaccine. Domestically, states are struggling with a loss of technological sovereignty in terms of governing data and unilaterally taxing the winners of the digital economy. Some of the largest European governments have been unable to implement their own contact-tracing protocols due to the stranglehold of Apple and Google. At the same time, there are serious concerns regarding data privacy in both centralized contact tracing as well as using the Apple/Google protocol should such national protocol be implemented, which further underlines the importance of data privacy in the twenty-first century. Today's biggest winners are the big tech companies, who represent the lion's share of the most valuable companies that run on data, algorithms and apps rather than physical labor, but have also managed to utilize the under-governed nature of the digital domain to avoid paying tax and social security. The societal flipside of the growing digital gaps between winners and losers has been skyrocketing inequality and the hollowing-out of the ...

There has always existed an interplay between humankind and technology's promise to improve our lives. Seldom, and certainly not in modern times, has the adoption of technology accelerated as quickly as it has with the Covid-19 pandemic. In the past year, the Lion's share of work and social interactions has gone digital and thus technologies have permeated the fabric of everyday life. This has created both immense opportunities and complex challenges. On one hand, citizens are now able to engage with the world from their living rooms and have access to an unprecedented breadth of knowledge. Technology is revolutionizing healthcare in areas such as diagnosis and vaccine production. In the case of tedious and dangerous tasks, we have been able to substitute humans with robots, and algorithms for our advanced computation. On the other hand, there has been a decline in trust of democracy and an increase in political polarization. Europeans are increasingly seeing that this is made worse by social media and are, in general, feeling more negatively towards the Big Tech companies. This is in part because geopolitical conflict accompanied our migration to the digital domain. It now threatens to splinter the internet, and to disrupt supply chains and companies. Whilst the relevance of technology and the digital domain is increasing at an exponential rate, much remains unregulated. The digital economy relies on the wholesale of private data; the digital discussion is filtered through algorithms that do not favor veracity and reason; and the geopolitical conflict is lacking new governance solution. We have before us a unique opportunity, thanks to technological development, to improve our lives, societies, and the international system. The question is: what should be done? This is the key motivation behind our annual report, European Tech Insights, which investigates how citizens see their relationship with technology and how we can actively shape the future accordingly. Indeed, this was the catalyst for the creation of ...

Our research shows that citizens of the hardest-hit countries by COVID-19 are changing their attitudes and becoming more willing to make concessions in terms of privacy and freedom of movement. An overwhelming majority of Italians (79 %) and Spaniards (67 %) support the implementation of restrictive tracking systems like the ones deployed in China. The number of citizens that are willing to reduce their privacy through more CCTV or social network surveillance by governments has also grown in the span of three months by 19 % in China, 15 % in Italy, and 4 % in Spain.