Imagine you are sitting comfortably in a small motorboat. Water is leaking in through several holes. The leaks are obvious. But the weather is nice and the mood is good. With a little imagination, the water ingress could be stopped with existing materials. But the helmsman prefers to accelerate, hoping to make the boat glide over the water.
I wonder how our Chancellor assesses the situation? The threat of a Russian nuclear first strike is growing. But we are all right. Corona is over at last. Life again at last! What do a few wet feet matter?
Perhaps we should listen more to those who look closely and then also have an idea how to plug the holes. In 2013 I used ‚Svchost.exe‘ as the most plausible Windows service for an attack in my book „THE TRILLION DOLLAR GAP 2 – Global Spy Pact Quadrilla X“. In fact, a similar attack used this service to attack the German Bundestag just two years later. In 2014, in my third book „THE TRILLION DOLLAR GAP 3 – The Global WEB Resistance“, I developed a scenario in which, by strengthening Russia’s democracy-building through digital technology, the Ukraine war could not have started in 2022. At the time, SWR considered a possible publication of the topic, but then decided against it. Since 2022, the German government has had a proposal passed by political bodies on how a Russian resistance could still be promoted now through digital support for democracy education alone.
Hardly anyone still believes that the Ukraine war will end in the next few months. Nevertheless, the press reports are structured as if the delivery of weapons, air defence systems, tanks and soon fighter jets could each lead to an end to the war in the short term.
The digital democracy education I suggested could have prevented war in 2014. Short-term successes in the war today cannot be achieved in this way. What is the point of long-term measures if they do not lead to short-term effects in the press?
One time period is mentioned again and again: „It will take about 2 years before we have newly built tanks at our disposal.“ Russia will also need this time. It will also take 2 years to train very specialised IT workers. Now we learn from the press that Russian schoolchildren are getting military drill again. I could not read how many students are being trained as hackers. A tank costs from 15 million euros upwards. 2 years of study cost the state maybe 20,000 euros. So why shouldn’t Putin train as many hackers as possible from the almost unlimited Russian human resources?
Even if the mood in our country is still good, it will not remain with wet feet. Either we plug as many holes as possible right now and make ourselves fit for a digital democracy that can counter autocratic Russia, or we will go down without further damage. There is no view of the overall damage picture. The cost of cyberattacks is now half the federal budget! The advertising-optimised search engines obscure our view of what is important. The surveillance industry uses child abuse as an alibi to be able to monitor everything and everyone seamlessly. It accepts open doors, which Russian hackers also like to use. The interconnectedness of the Internet of Things and monitoring increasingly empowers manufacturers to control their customers, just as it increases the possibilities for hacks. Social media and an increasingly disconnected press put artificial excitement rather than real news at the forefront. Russian fake bots thrive on this breeding ground.
In a sentence, we are far from being able to export a digital democratic rule of law that we ourselves do not yet possess. I have published what such a digital constitutional state could look like in more than 100 statements on EU initiatives at https://gisad.eu/statements/.
Here again is my very specific statement: „If we do not now consistently build a digital society that takes into account our pre-digital democratic achievements, it will not be ten years before we get to know the underwater world. Without breathing apparatus, this will not be fun.