Over the last ten years that I've been
writing about the World Wide Web I've watched it transform our world.
Already a quarter of our planet's population is connected,
providing individual users with access to knowledge
and to each other unprecedented in human history.
Well, it represents the emergence of a completely new information
ecosystem that will have
a more profound impact on human civilisation than the printing press.
It's driving transparency, the perfection of information.
The Web seems to have set information free and we've seen
that embolden ordinary people in a fight for freedom and democracy.
The Web naturally tends to lead to openness and it makes openness easy and closedness more difficult.
Anyone who wants to participate has at least the means to participate.
But all is not what it seems.
In the chaotic free for all of this virtual revolution
there is an ebb and flow of winners and losers in the fight for power.
It is a hugely powerful tool for the state to control us, to know about us.
We are only at the beginning of being able to see
how that power balance will... will work out.
Even as the age-old struggle for freedom captures the headlines, quietly in its wake,
the Web is shifting power, sometimes menacingly, in ways we could never have imagined.
It's accelerating globalisation. It's providing us with new
allegiances that cross traditional borders...
but it's also reinventing warfare and seems to be creating frightening cultural cul-de-sacs.
In the face of all this, old centres of power are crumbling.
This film is about the scramble to fill the vacuum left behind and what that means for us.
The brief history of the Web is littered with new applications that have unintended consequences.
What at first seem to be inconsequential
fads take on a life of their own as users harness them to a new cause.
Perhaps the ultimate example of this is how a Web service called
Twitter came to threaten one of the world's most hardline regimes.
Twitter was developed in San Francisco in 2006.
Along with Facebook, it's part of a Web phenomenon known as social
networking, fancy jargon for new ways to stay in touch with friends.
Twitter enables you to send a message, known as a tweet, from your phone or computer.
The message can only be 140 characters long
and is read by anyone who subscribes to your Twitter page.
Soon after its launch, tweets started to flood the Web
with people recounting their lives in minute and mind-numbing detail.
It's a microcosm of the World Wide Web, Twitter.
When it began it seemed something just for geeks or people who just wanted to endlessly twitter.
I mean it's well... it seemed very well named. All it was was inconsequential prattle.
Many people who didn't already use the service saw it as yet
another example of the superficial, all about me, culture of the Web.
But then something revolutionary happened.
Iran, June 2009.
In the aftermath of a presidential election, opposition supporters poured out onto the streets to vent
their anger at what they saw as a rigged contest.
The Iranian State hit back with riot police and a ban on any media reporting inside the country.
So protesters turned to Twitter to tell the world what was happening.
And in extraordinary numbers.
In the first 18 days alone, over two million tweets were sent out of Iran by over half a million people.
At its height, 200,000 tweets about Iran were posted every hour.
One Iranian, living in England, was on the receiving end of many of these tweets. She has
family in Iran so we can't show her face or give away her real name.
She's known under her Twitter Tag, Oxford Girl.
I'd get up to go make a coffee and I'd come back and there was 3,000 tweets that I'd missed.
As she forwarded these messages to a wider public, she became
a crucial link between the protesters and the outside world.
Somebody would message me, or email me, and say, "I've just got news from somebody
"that's on such and such a road and they're arresting people, tell people to go the other way."
Twitter is the effect of the Web. Information is placed in the hands of the people
making it like quick silver, irrepressible and uncontainable.
It's a bit like the Berlin Wall was, if you like.
Imagine how quickly the Berlin Wall would have fallen if Twitter had existed.
It made me feel very pleased and excited that something was happening,
also very alarmed because things can go very wrong, very quickly.
Soon, not just social networks like Twitter, but video sharing sites
like YouTube were caught up in the life and death struggle in Iran.
After a young Iranian woman was shot, millions witnessed her dying moments.
They actually saw, in real time, someone young, energetic, with their life ahead of them, being
killed senselessly by this regime and people felt like they wanted revenge for her death.
The Web is shaking up world's politics because it
can capture information from a crowd of eyewitnesses and then it can transmit it globally in real time.
It's unmediated, it's interactive and it's mobile.
This means that it's a radical step forward from the 20th century's
great gift to politics - live television.
Unlike live TV, Web video prompts instant reaction from right across
the globe and that then feeds back into events unfolding on the ground.
As tragic as the events in Iran were, there was also a lot of excitement
in the ability of individuals in Iran
to connect with a global audience and with their peers inside Iran,
to use the power of information to inspire
resistance to the regime there and to build a political consciousness in support of democracy.
What you've seen evolving on the Web is a great example
of how humans co-evolve with their tools.
We change our tools and then our tools change us and that cycle continues.
The new communications infrastructure did not cause the uprising.
What caused the uprising was political discontent.
It was just that when people in their moment of need wanted to do something
coordinated they could suddenly lay their hands on these tools, in a way they hadn't been able to before.
So the Web is like a tool box for protest unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
The geeks who run Twitter aren't surprised by its transformation
from mouthpiece of celebrity drivel to weapon of revolution.
In both cases, the driving principle is the same.
Well, I think openness is a revolution in and of itself.
I mean you put thoughts out there and you attract other people that
you wouldn't otherwise have attracted and things happen.
It's like a chemical reaction takes place.
It's sort of inevitable that the free flow of information will
happen now that these technologies
will exist in the world and people will talk amongst themselves and...
and that leads to power.
What's astonishing is how authority, even powerful nation states, seem unable to get to grips with the Web.
But look a little more deeply and the reason becomes clear.
The Web's linked information is piped through an older physical system, the Internet,
that operates beyond the jurisdiction of any one country and works against central control.
It's ironic, given that it now threatens the state,
that the Internet was originally designed to protect the most powerful nation of modern times.
The Internet's origins lie in the Cold War, when America and Soviet
Russia were squaring up under the looming threat of nuclear holocaust.
In 1957, the American Government got the shock of its life
when the Russians launched the first ever space satellite, Sputnik.
Determined never to be outwitted by the Soviets again, the Americans set
up the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA for short.
ARPA was given a huge budget and told to go create something that
would beat the Reds at their own game.
Now the Pentagon didn't have a clue what that was.
They just wanted to protect America.
ARPA wasn't your run of the mill military R&D department, focusing on the nuts and bolts of new weapons...
It gathered together some of the brightest civilian scientists
in America and told them to look far into the future to come up with something really revolutionary.
One of the areas ARPA got stuck into was communications.
Using the new technology of computers it developed the ARPA Net,
a groundbreaking network and precursor of the Internet.
By the early 1970s, ARPA Net was one of several similar networks across the world.
The problem was how to join them up.
In 1974, two computer scientists, Vint Cerf and Bob Khan,
created the rules by which these networks could speak to each other.
This marked the beginning of the global Internet that we know today.
The experience that we had at the beginning was
simply solving a fairly tricky and interesting engineering problem.
I don't think either of us appreciated that the solution
to that problem would lead to what we have today, which is a global network of networks with over...
almost two billion people online.
Underlying Vint Cerf's work was a technology called packet switching.
It lies at the heart of the virtual revolution.
Packet switching takes a piece of information and breaks it up into small pieces.
These are then sent over a network, often not in the right order or even over the same line.
At the receiver's end, the packets are recombined in the right order and the data is made whole again.
Packet switching is the perfect tool for computers to talk to each other because it allows for a huge amount
of data to be transmitted fast through multiple roots all at once.
This architecture means an unstoppable flow of data and it's this that would
have dramatic consequences for individuals and governments in the years that followed.
Part of my motivation, when I was working on the Internet,
was exactly to build a system that did not have any central control.
Recall that this was being supported by the US Defence Department and one of the things Defence
Department wants is highly reliable and resilient systems.
One way to achieve that is to not have any central place it could be
attacked and destroyed and therefore interfere with the operation of the Net.
So the consequence of this decentralised architecture
is that it is highly resilient to a variety of impairments and in consequence of that
it would be very hard for anybody to shut the Internet down entirely.
When it started, the old ARPA Net connected up four universities across America.
'The Internet today links up a quarter of the population of the planet.'
The hubs of the Internet are route servers.
They work a bit like phone directories.
They connect all of our computers to the websites that we want to see.
It looks like an anonymous office block but this building actually houses one of the 13 route servers
that keep the Internet flowing across the world.
We have multiple doors of access, cameras in the ceiling and then we have a lot of...
of true floor to true ceiling walls
that are solid construction, so that you can't really go in very easily.
The outsides of walls are all metal mesh. We also have motion sensors
in our ceilings so that no-one can even go through the drop ceiling.
What you're saying is what's in that room is
extremely valuable and extremely important.
Absolutely.
All this security is here to protect the holy of holies, the inner sanctum of the server room.
This room is responsible for all of the dot com addresses in the world, 80 million of them.
The smooth running of the world economy depends on it.
That's actually a database server over there, so huge chunks of disk space.
In its way, this room is probably as important as the Oval Office.
Let's take a moment to listen to the sound of 80 million dot coms.
LOUD HUM
What would happen if I pulled the plug, if suddenly there was a power outage here,
in Mountain View, California?
So most of the data centres that you'll find have a bunch of redundancy in them.
We ourselves have, um uninterruptable power supplies, we have diesel generators.
If, for example, our own route server were to go down, as I said there's 12
other ones, and even if you were to attack say, one of these 13, those 13 are really a constellation
of about a 191 different other servers that are round there.
So it's not even just attacking one of the 13.
You really have to get out and do a whole, you know,
collection of servers to get really what you were looking for.
So it's not that easy to take down the Internet.
Individual countries like Iran can't shut it down, even if they
wanted to, because it's a global shared system.
An international body called ICAM, that has no allegiance to any one
country, oversees the route servers, but its role is limited.
ICAM, as this international entity, do they have the power to regulate,
do they have the power to turn the Internet on and off?
You know, I don't know that anybody has the power to turn the Internet on and off.
It became more and more apparent that the Internet's style of operation
was the antithesis of what most countries had been accustomed to.
In fact in the early days of telephony and telegraphy there was only one network
and it was often managed by and operated by the government, giving it substantial control.
So I rather liked the idea that the Internet didn't have that,
let me call it, deficiency and therefore opened a platform up.
It's probably the most democratic opportunity for people to express
themselves and to get information than has ever existed.
In the 20th century, if you
had something to say in public, you couldn't, period.
If you were a civilian, if you were a citizen,
but not a media professional, you could not broadcast a message, no matter how hard you tried.
People who went out of their way to try to get messages out in public through amateur channels, like
you know, holding up signs on the street, or you know, by the roadside,
were widely regarded as being kind of off their rockers.
And that changed.
That change is enormous, that anyone who wants to participate
has at least the means to participate, is a huge change.
If you have a communication system that's unbreakable, with no central control, that can
amplify a message, then information, which is already hugely powerful, becomes supercharged.
In the right or the wrong hands, it takes a massive significance in battles against authority.
Anonymous users can now perform the role of investigative journalists
by publishing hard information and protecting primary sources.
And nowhere is this new power more apparent than on a website called Wikileaks.
Wikileaks allows people to anonymously blow the whistle on governments and corporations.
The people who run it have made some pretty powerful enemies...
No wonder they like to keep a low profile.
The question of Internet censorship has become one of the most central questions of our time,
that will define on how societies all over the world will be able to freely communicate in the future.
Wikileaks has posted a membership list of the BNP,
naming several teachers, doctors and police officers.
It's published the classified US Army documents about Guantanamo Bay,
revealing abuse of prisoners' rights.
The contents of the American politician Sarah Palin's Yahoo email were put online,
showing how she used her private account to evade public record laws.
The publication of a report in 2008 detailed hundreds of assassinations by the Kenyan police.
Wikileaks has a database of over 1.2 two million documents.
It maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military grade encryption
to protect sources and other confidential information.
In some countries, there are no ways for people to get in touch
with reliable journalists to even find out who they could trust.
So it's very important to offer one entity like us, that...
that has a reputation and that is offering this anonymous way for people to submit this information.
The Web is a barrier to a state
that's trying to control information and it's a...
it's an impossible task for them
as people have personal computers and they can encrypt information
and send it to other people who have the key.
You can't get in the middle there and get at... at that information.
And once you publish something, the ability to find it and, you know, stop it from spreading is...
is near impossible.
And so even though there's efforts to do that, you know,
states are gonna have to admit that information will be out there.
Publishing sensitive and often damaging documents on the Web means Wikileaks is under constant attack.
In February 2008 came a court injunction by a Swiss Bank,
Bank Julius Baer, after Wikileaks published allegations about tax evasion.
This was the first big case where an organisation tried to legally go after us.
So we published documents about hundreds of millions in tax evaded monies.
A judge in California, where the case was brought, ruled that the Wikileaks site be taken offline.
But if the bank saw that as a victory, it was sadly mistaken.
The only effect was that half the world got interested in the bank's documents.
So the New York Times published our IP address and CBS News said,
freedom of speech has a number and published our IP address.
So these are again dynamic effects that sharing knowledge with people all over the world can
produce then. You can easily have a court rule that one story gets deleted from your digital archive.
On the other hand, the Internet is not such a controlled environment any
more and it consists of individuals and all these individuals can just make sure that some information
stays where it was, or will still be available in numerous other places.
There's a famous quote that says the Net interprets censorship
as damage and routes around it.
And when John Gilmour said that he actually wasn't being metaphorical.
He was literally describing the communication protocols of the Internet.
So if you're trying to get a message from point A to point B
on the Internet, it's sort of like driving from place A to place B...
You've got a network of roads, there's multiple ways that you could drive.
Well, censorship is a kind of a blockage in the roads.
It's like putting up a wall saying messages can't get through.
It's in the very protocols of the Internet that if that happens, that condition is detected and
it goes to a fall back, and says OK, I can't get through this way,
is there another road by which I can get there?
And the Internet's protocols find other ways to get through.
It's not just the hardware that enables resistance to censorship.
When a government or organisation tries to block a website, there's always some highly
motivated geek with the necessary computing skills to play David to the state's Goliath.
I think that the reason you see so many people taking on
governments is because with computers we're all on a level playing field.
When I was young I think that's one of the first
things I realised was wow, I can sit here behind my dial-up modem
and programme just as well, and do everything that somebody with a bigger computer can do.
The way the Web enables individuals to route around censorship and
blockages is shown clearly again by the Iranian crisis.
Once the Iranian Government realised what was going on, they blocked sites like Twitter and Facebook.
On the other side of the world, a 25-year-old San Franciscan was moved to action.
Austin Heap used his programming skills to develop Haystack, an encryption programme so-called
because it hides in everyday Web data.
He claims it's a secure way for ordinary Iranians to load sites blocked by their government.
So what I have set up right here is
I'm piping my connection through a machine inside of Iran, so that
anything I do here will be subject to the same filtering technologies that somebody there would experience.
So with normal filtering in Iran I'm just gonna go ahead and try to load Facebook.com.
And what happens is you quickly get the access denied site.
It's not even making that connection to Facebook.
It's just getting terminated by their filters.
So I'm gonna turn Haystack on and then I'm just gonna go ahead and click reload
and on this side of the screen you'll quickly see what Haystack is doing.
That's a lot of numbers.
You see, now from Iran we've loaded Facebook.
And everything you do with Haystack running is secure, it's encrypted, it can't be filtered.
You know, they're no chance that they're gonna find out what your
login was and then try to trace that back to who you are in real life.
You see all of this media that comes out that's incredibly graphic
and I would have my daily breakdown and you just have to kind of
have it and get over it, you know, because the next day may be worse.
It's not bad for me. I'm not there.
I may cry for ten minutes, but that's their life.
So the Web gives citizens power to route around censorship and its ease of access
gives them an unparalleled ability to blow the whistle on wrongdoing.
Bring these elements together and you have the tools for motivated
people to gather around a single issue very quickly.
'In some ways, the Web seems to be taking us back
'to a world before party politics, a world of direct action.
'Nowhere is this more apparent than in the campaign here in Britain on climate change.'
The Web is not going to rival the state,
it's not threatening to wipe the state out, but what it does
possibly threaten to do is make various forms of
national politics irrelevant because people can bypass them.
In the past, mention of a political party or, er, you know, voting in our
elections was one of the only ways you could express your politics
and the state would prefer it
if that was the only way in which we expressed our politics.
But traditional electoral politics is becoming less and less relevant.
Essentially, my generation, and people younger than me,
feel completely disillusioned with mainstream party politics.
So where does that leave you if those people are not representing your views?
You need a different forum and a different medium in which to express your politics.
And in the past you were quite limited in
your ability to do that, whereas now you're able to express your own views simply by logging onto the Internet.
At an event organised by the Climate Camp for Action, designed to shut down a coal-fired power station
in Nottinghamshire, activists come together from all over the country.
Everyone here is the media, filming events as they unfold.
Footage and stills are uploaded to their website through constant updates.
But the Web provides more than just tools for protest.
Its connections inspire solidarity in the group.
I think that the nature of community has changed.
Before the Internet the only communities that you could be a part of were communities that
you could be physically present in, like so, you know, you would have to
be geographically close to the other people in it or, or a part of some existing organisation or structure.
Whereas now, you can suddenly decide one day you know what, I wanna do something about climate change,
say, and you can just log onto the Climate Camp Site, sign up for an email list, and suddenly you're
involved in that discussion and you're a member of that community.
The Web is this fantastic resource for transmitting information and
gathering people together around an issue, even in a particular place.
But it's very, very short-term. What the Web can do is
throw up coalitions out of nothing and it can blow them away again.
What the state can do is over decades, over centuries, entrench
people's identities, organise their fears, organise their hopes.
I think the Internet empowers anyone who can use it and...
and it empowers the people who can use it most effectively even more.
It can empower a government to repress an insurrection, it could empower the insurrection itself...
It's a double-edged sword.
We've seen how the Web hands tremendous power to the individual
and provides purpose and cohesion to disparate groups.
But set against these new freedoms is the unshakable authority of the state.
So what develops is an arms race between the citizen and the state.
To my mind, the best example of this being played out right now, is in China.
China is a one-party state, where for 60 years, the Communist Party has ruled with an iron fist.
Here the Web presents both a massive headache and a great opportunity.
China has more people online than any other nation in the world, 253 million.
So the Web's effect on politics is a huge threat to the state.
And yet the technology has helped drive China's phenomenal economic growth.
The Chinese State has to play a skilful game of cat and mouse with its citizens.
This is a game that's defining the Web in the 21st century.
TRANSLATOR: 'I think the Government wants to
use the power of the Internet to boost the economy,
'but in terms of politics, culture and society,
'they're really worried about information on the Web that can be a threat to them.'
They can't simply turn off the Internet, because Chinese businesses
live by export and they need to talk to Western customers. Chinese universities live by
getting information from Western universities
by reading research papers, lecture notes, and they can't block that.
They do want to block Falun Gong, they do want to block stuff related to the Dalai Lama,
so it's hard.
The efforts China puts into censoring the Web are staggering.
An estimated 30,000 Chinese secretly police the Web full time.
The Chinese have become really adept in the last 15 years at
what is widely referred to as the Great Firewall of China, this ring of censorship around
the kind of metaphorical edge of the country, which censors inbound professional media,
so the Chinese will look at the New York Times and say, "We're shutting off access".
They do it with Wikipedia and so forth.
So it might appear that the massive investment
the Chinese state has made in policing the Web is paying off.
They've effectively managed to block Western websites that might be critical of their policies.
What we fail to grasp,
when we're wringing our hands about the New York Times' website
or even the BBC's website being blocked, is that for the Chinese Government, the challenge of the Web
isn't about liberal Western information coming into the country.
They perceive the threat as coming from within,
from the conversations that hundreds of millions of Chinese people are having amongst themselves.
The most powerful and poignant illustration of this came in May 2008,
when a massive earthquake in Szechuan wiped out 70,000 Chinese people.
While schools collapsed, Communist Party buildings were left largely intact.
Quiet outrage of ordinary Chinese on the Web focused a new challenge to the authorities.
The incidence of the earthquake was reported by Chinese citizens,
taking pictures of it and in some cases video of it,
and posting it in, nearly instantaneously up on QQ, China's largest Internet server,
and out on Twitter.
And this isn't media that comes from outside the country,
from predictable and professional sources.
It's media that's generated inside the country, headed back out from half a billion amateur sources.
In the case of no official, media can investigate the school collapse issue,
many bloggers picked up that -
particularly there's one Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei,
who is also a very known blogger -
he started a project of compiling all the names of the dead children
of the school collapse, putting it on his blogs.
And then, his action inspired hundreds of volunteers
that actually went to the earthquake region, did the investigation,
and compiling those children's names on their blogs.
'The government didn't like it when a huge number of volunteers
'went to investigate the schools that had collapsed in Szechuan.
'But my view is whether the government likes it or not,
'this spontaneous energy will grow and grow.'
But censorship is just one tactic employed by the state.
China, like many governments, exploits the fact that citizens
are putting more and more of their lives online.
One of the biggest innovations in surveillance over the past few years has come about as a result of
the spread of social networking sites and of social facilities on all sorts of other sites.
Because once people make visible who their friends are, it's possible to
do a clustering analysis and start looking for covert communities.
And this is an enormously powerful tool in the hands of
the police and intelligence services in finding out who adheres to some
particular disliked belief, be that Islamism, or in China, a love of democracy or whatever.
Unable or unwilling to stifle all free debate on the Web, the Chinese authorities
are also using the Web back on itself, harnessing its power
to spread information instantly to wage a battle of ideas online.
'I think that if you can't block the Internet then you have to guide it.
'It's the only way.
'When a society is being pulled apart by the pressure of rule,
'then you need to adjust your strategy.'
The government started recruiting what it called Internet Commentators, citizens
who would write articles and post comments all over the Web in support of the official party line.
Ordinary Chinese dubbed them the 50 cent Army,
because for each article or comment, they're paid the princely sum of 50 cents.
It's estimated there are as many as 300,000 "50 Centers" operating in China today.
'Censorship is two things. One is blocking, and the other, guiding.
'The so-called 50 Cent Army is more about the second method.
'Sometimes they need to effectively guide opinion in a particular channel or direction.'
But once again the online community is wising up to the ongoing game of cat and mouse.
Wen Yunchao used to be one of these 50 Centers.
But he's sceptical of just how effective the online spin really is.
'In reality, the effect of the 50 cent army has been exaggerated.
'We know that the government has spent a lot of energy in training professional Internet Commentators.
'They also have so-called part-time Internet Commentators.
'But from the Internet, we can see that their force is very weak.
'Sometimes, on a website, an article is placed
'in a really obvious position, and as soon as we see it we know it's an article by a 50 Center.'
So despite the Chinese Government's sophisticated nuanced use of the Web, in the long term the Web shows
a Houdini-like ability to escape any effort to constrain it.
Countries that tend to be rather closed and where information flow
was not very good, have used the Internet to open up.
And once you've allowed openness, it's very difficult to push it back.
The Internet is certainly a force
for open communications in China, like it is anywhere else,
and so the more it catches on there,
the more they'll move towards a democratic-type society, more in the model that we're used to.
Fortunately, that's happening. As they're getting richer,
as they're using technology, as they're connecting up to people around the world,
that idea that you can really fundamentally suppress information is...is going away.
We're beginning to see the rise of a political consciousness
in many nations that have been repressed by dictatorships.
It's interesting to me that both Premier Wen Jiabao in China
and President Medvedev in Russia,
are both now responding to bloggers on the Web.
Even though they are leaders within authoritarian regimes, they are now feeling the need to respond to this
rising political consciousness that is emerging on the Web.
Well, the battle between people and authority rages on.
It seems to me that the notion of the state may ultimately be eroded by other forces at play on the Web,
forces that challenge our real world ideas of identity, of nationality, and community.
The global reach of the Web has provided enormous inspiration and power
to people who for whatever agenda, aspire to redraw the map of the world.
The most important first attempt to harness a new kind of global consciousness through the Web
came not through any information-based sites, but through a money service.
Back in the late 1990s,
one man saw that the Web's ability to function globally,
unregulated and uncontrolled by individual governments,
meant ordinary people had a new channel to freely move money around the world.
'Peter Thiel is not as well-known as Bill Gates or Tim Berners-Lee,
'but he should be. He's the man who founded PayPal,'
a revolutionary international money-transfer system. In effect, a new global currency.
Through PayPal, money can be moved across national borders through abstract cyberspace.
By 2008, it was handling 60 billion in transactions
every year.
I came to believe that the place in which the decision would be made
for the individual or for the state
would be not be in the halls of politics
or in public debates or in things like that, but in the development of new technologies.
Basically, the future of the 21st century
was going to involve some version of globalisation and we had to get it to work,
and, you know, that means we had to somehow figure out ways
to break down certain barriers that exist between people.
The origins of PayPal lie at Stanford University, just outside San Francisco.
Thiel met Max Levchin, a computer scientist, at a seminar.
They hit it off and their collaboration would lead to PayPal.
Now, for Thiel, he saw this as an opportunity to make some money.
But he also saw it as a chance to put some of his deepest-held beliefs into practice.
The slogan that we had for PayPal was that it was the new world currency and that it was going to somehow
change the way the world thought about money,
meaning of money, the way people would transact, and would basically, um,
in some sense give people sovereignty over their money in a way in which they had not had it ever before.
PayPal's system allows ordinary people to transfer small amounts
of money internationally, and, like so much of the Web, it caught authority on the hop.
Here is PayPal bank. Is it a payment service, is it a money transmitter?
Strictly speaking, it did not fall under any regulatory frame,
and so there was an opening during which the company could be built, and then you'd figure it out later.
Peter Thiel next saw the potential of Facebook
as a way of forming communities not bound by nationality.
He was a key early investor in what has become the world's largest social network.
Facebook now has 350 million users worldwide.
If it was a country, it would boast the third biggest population in the world.
The Web has led to all kinds of new social groups, and I think, in part,
it is simply because the existing ones have been extraordinarily constrained by geography and history
and these are not necessarily the best ways for groups to be organised.
You often wanna have groups with people you have things in common with, or people you can learn from.
The Internet has liberated individuals, challenged existing power structures of nation states
and the future is still somewhat open, but certainly the first 15 years are very positive.
Peter Thiel is a true Web visionary.
He saw how the Web would shrink the world, how it would establish new ways of doing things,
bypassing tradition and rendering the old redundant.
But the Web offers a flip side to Thiel's vision.
There are other pioneers of the Web who see in it a way to turn
a community against the world, not to create a new openness or broader allegiances, but to narrow identity.
Before the Web, extremists tended to be scattered in small numbers around the world.
The Web linked them all, gave them new tools, allowing them to seize the initiative.
Al Qaeda quickly recognised this new medium's ability to spread the message of fear and terror.
Islamist groups have now chosen to
primarily disseminate their material through the Internet,
because this way they can be fully in control in
how the message is disseminated and where.
Pretty much every day,
Al Qaeda and the Taliban are putting out
propaganda videos, where they're showing attacks,
or they're eulogising particular leaders, one who's perhaps been killed in a drone strike...
They will do a long, maybe even 40-minute video,
mainly of somebody talking about this person's great deeds,
interspersed with high-quality video.
A lot of the message is based on anger
and arousing anger. They use a lot of images,
images of women and children killed,
or you know, other horrific images.
It's more like shock tactics to kind of get you into gear,
create that kind of sense of urgency.
Al Qaeda, like the Internet, has no centre.
It's a dispersed group of loosely associated people.
Wherever Jihadists are in the world, the Web lets them talk to
like-minded people and their belief system is instantly reinforced.
The Web acts as a kind of virtual, portable homeland.
The concept of a portable homeland
refers to how different groups operating in different countries in
the world, who have similar aims, can use the Internet as a space that links all of them.
So the Internet replaces, in some way, the borders of a particular country
for each of these groups and links them as if they all live in one place.
After 9/11, when the Taliban were driven out from Afghanistan, they moved to Pakistan,
and a very important way of staying in touch with them was through cyber cafes, Internet cafes,
because they knew they couldn't get on mobile phones for fear of being tracked.
And a lot of the terror plots that we've seen in this country have been traced back to cyber cafes
in Pakistan, in India, in Bangladesh and elsewhere.
The Web collapses distances.
Fanatics the world over can talk to each other with ease.
The Web allows them to create and live in their own little worlds.
This is something Ishtiaq Hussain saw firsthand in London
when he was a member of Hizb ut Tahrir, the party of liberation.
If you live in an area where there's no like-minded people, you can just go on the Web
and communicate with people who are like-minded,
so you don't even need to physically meet them.
Individuals have gone online,
they've never even met members of these groups, yet they've read their writings, gone on their websites
and radicalised themselves, a bit like your DIY type of terrorist.
We've had a few cases here in the UK. So the Web definitely does play a big part in this.
We are 100% committed to the cause of Islam.
We love death the way you love life.
I tell all you British Citizens to stop your support to your lying British Government.
This is what Web critics call cyber-balkanisation. The Web allows users to filter
their world view through selective reading and connections.
Cranks speak unto cranks and reinforce their extremism.
The way the Web can help trap groups in their own twisted world view is something that nags away at the man
who created the Web in the first place, in the hope that it would connect humanity, not divide it.
When they go to a website,
the website only links to other websites which believe the strange things that these people believe,
and then you get people who end up sitting just by their computers communicating in such a way that
when they meet somebody in the street the only way they can communicate with them
is to shoot them. No, that is one vision of a horrible cultural pothole.
I think one of the greatest paradoxes of the Web is that
on the one hand, we applaud it for giving us all a voice and for giving us tremendous power,
but on the other hand, this power can be used for good or for ill.
As we put more and more of our lives on the Web,
we're becoming more and more vulnerable to the bad elements,
to the networks of hate and to the darker uses of the Web.
The most extreme example of this menacing side of the Web was plain to see as recently as 2007,
when a whole country was almost brought to its knees via an assault directed through the Web.
Estonia, a tiny country of 1.5 million people, situated on the border with Russia,
has been described as the most wired country in Europe.
97% of all banking transactions are done online,
so this was a tempting target for any so-called cyber warrior.
We are very involved in the digital revolution, if you will,
and therefore we need to protect this,
because if something does go wrong, we are uniquely vulnerable
and we don't want to lose this way of life.
In April 2007, a row broke out between Russia and Estonia,
because the Estonians wanted to move this Russian War Memorial from the centre of Tallinn
to this more remote location. To the many Russians who still lived here,
this was deeply offensive, and they took to the streets
in riots that lasted for two nights, Estonia's worst period of civil unrest.
But far more disruptive was what soon followed.
A sustained cyber attack aimed at bringing down Estonia's biggest institutions.
The most common form of cyber attack is called a denial of service.
One computer sends instructions to a network of computers, known as a botnet.
These are just ordinary domestic computers that have been hacked
and are now under the control of cyber warriors.
This network bombards the chosen site with millions of requests.
The site goes into meltdown trying to respond and it means, for the duration of the attack,
no-one can access the website, hence denial of service.
In Estonia, in May 2007, the cyber attacks rained down on the economic heart of this tiny state.
It affected us mainly in that, Government sites were shut down,
businesses were shut down, banks were targeted.
We had serious problems with external Internet site,
so our customers couldn't get inside of the Internet bank.
If you take down the newspapers, you don't know what's going on in the country.
If you take down the banks, the economic activity is paralysed.
And if you're and Estonian businessman in Paris and you need to
contact your bank over the Internet
to get some funds out, you couldn't, and Estonia eventually shut this off
by cutting themselves off from the outside world.
they sealed the borders, wouldn't take any incoming messages over the Internet.
What makes cyber war such a threat to the state is that
the state doesn't even know who or where the attack is coming from.
Very difficult to know who is attacking you in cyberspace,
because cyber investigations usually end at a compromised computer
in a third country on which the logs have been deleted.
It probably wasn't organised in Uruguay, or it probably wasn't organised in,
I don't know, Mali.
We can't really tell today who was the mastermind behind it all,
whether there WAS just one mastermind,
and there is no clear evidence of state involvement.
However, what we can show is that the Russian Federation did not cooperate
in mitigating these attacks, so at least there might have been passive support to these attacks.
The Estonians I spoke with would not go as far as to accuse the Kremlin of launching the attacks.
If I lived in a tiny country on the edge of Russia, I think I'd also be careful who I pointed the finger at.
But my search to understand the new world order on the Web
took me to Moscow, and there I unearthed a promising lead.
In a dingy townhouse, a commissar in Nashi, a nationalistic youth movement, agreed to talk to me.
I expected the standard Russian denial of any involvement in the attack.
Instead, the trail had led me to the very person who claimed to have attacked Estonia.
It turns out a kid did it. This kid.
TRANSLATOR: 'My role was such that I was an initiator
'of this battle on the Internet.
'I was a developer of the technology used, in addition to being an organiser of these actions.'
'More than 5,000 people were arrested in Tallinn at the time. Their human rights were violated on a mass scale.
'Our intention was to carry out a mass action, to do what the Estonian authorities were most scared of.
'And because we couldn't go to Estonia, we did it over the Internet.
'These were no cyber attacks as such.
'It was cyber self-defence.'
'Cyber self-defence is no more than mass action on the Internet, in the same way that we can
'carry out mass demonstrations on the streets and in the cities, we can now do the same on the Internet.
'Such mass demonstrations will be especially interesting and popular in the 21st century.'
Was this your own initiative? Was there state involvement?
'These actions were never supported by the state.
'It was a reaction of civil society, which really does exist in Russia.
'Of course, the Estonian authorities were embarrassed that
'ordinary 18 to 20-year-old men had crashed their main sites.
'So they made up stories suggesting that the attacks had come from the Kremlin.'
As the world becomes more connected, there will be the opportunity
for nations to do bad things to each other.
We haven't seen very much of it yet,
but it's something that we have to think about for the future.
All you have to do is pick up the newspaper, and wherever you see
there is conflict in the real world, there is conflict in cyberspace.
I think it's very cost-effective to wage cyber war.
I mean, weapons systems tend to be very expensive
so I think we'll see more and more of it.
At best, we've seen how the Web can redefine democracy and open up new horizons.
On the streets of Iran, it brought together a crowd to challenge a regime.
Yet at its worst, it's reinforcing prejudices and closing doors.
In the hands of highly-motivated Russian teenagers,
it almost crippled a country.
At the moment, a quarter of the planet is connected.
But I wonder what will happen when the remaining 75% comes online.
Will the Web help us to achieve greater global understanding,
or will we face new dangers that we never even imagined?
By giving everyone a voice, it does create a cacophony,
and in this cacophony, often it is the most brutal,
even ruthless and conniving voices that are heard.
Can a social network bring down a regime?
I don't think it can bring down a regime,
but I think it can contribute to it, because it spreads ideas and the more quickly ideas are spread,
and the more access people have to those ideas, then the quicker things can change.
I think that we can all get carried away in the kind of liberal,
technorati of, "metropolitan Western world", but actually,
this technology is accessible to a very few people in very specific places
and we are only at the beginning of being able to kind of see how that power balance will work out.
After 20 years, we're just beginning to see the huge impact of the Web
on the very nature of power, and even warfare.
The Web confronts the world with both an incredible opportunity and an incredible responsibility.
The question for the future is how will we use it?
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