Asymmetrical warfare

Introduction
In the world of terrorism “asymmetrical warfare” is a well known term. It is the huge imbalance between the terrorist and the state. In this entry some of my thoughts on the asymmetrical warfare.

History: state versus state
In most of history, especially from the 15th century onwards, conflicts (especially wars) have mainly been fought between states. The state as a whole had the (economic) power to assemble an army and to fight another state. Later, some of the richest expeditionary companies (the Dutch East India Company for example) had their own navies and their own armies, yet they could hardly win from a state. Up until the collapse of the Soviet Union the armies, navies and airforces of the world were trained and equiped to fight states: The West versus the East. Ever since terrorism became more of a threat to states, they found that were quite unable to fight terrorism as well as they could fight states.

Asymmetrical warfare: state versus group
Most, if not all terrorist groups are organized in small cells or local groups. They never take the form of a state. This has made fighting them quite hard: the normal “old” tactics and strategies of the states don’t seem applicable anymore. Instead of having a clearly defined opponent with a clear territory, states are now fighting groups. These groups are mostly located inside states. So instead of fighting states as a whole, the states which are fighting the war on terror are now fighting groups inside states. The logical question arises: how can you fight a terrorist group who launches attacks on your state if it is located inside the borders of another sovereign state? Declaring war on the state as a whole is risky, illogical and ineffective: instead of dealing with one opponent (the terrorist group), you are now dealing with two: the terrorist group and the state.

The war on terror?
When “the war on terror” was declared by president George W. Bush it wasn’t immediately clear who he was addressing. Did the US declare war on states harbouring terrorist? Were the countries harbouring terrorists now a target? Or did the US merely declare on the terrorist groups living within certain countries? As has been seen with the invasion of Afghanistan, the US mainly targetted the terrorist government, in the form of the Taliban. As such, they attacked the state Afghanistan, not the terrorists directly.

A problem without a solution?
It is unclear what kind of solution can be found for the asymmetrical warfare. It can to some extent be compared to an elephant trying to get rid of a bug: the elephant has a major power (States armed forces) but is slow to respond and unable to exactly pinpoint the bug. The bug on the other hand is nimble, small, agile and highly mobile: before the elephant is ready to take action, the bug has moved. Until states can find a way to quickly and effective deal with terrorist groups, there is little or no solution to this problem.

Insuring a God

Insuring a God: How to insure companies hosting a virtual world?

This article is not about insuring items in the virtual World. What it is about is how to get insurance for a company which hosts a virtual world. By that I mean the company who designed and manages the virtual world, a company like Linden Labs, the owner of Second Life.

The issue
What would happen if all of the Linden Labs server would crash at the same time? No backups, so all of the virtual world called Second Life would be lost. Linden Labs would probably (if it doesn’t already) want to have an insurance for such an event.

The issue at hand is how to insure such a company. In Second Life the currency “Linden Dollars” is used. On several sites one can exchange Dollars or Euros for Linden Dollars. Most users of Second Life own property, which they paid for using exchanged real life currency. In the event that Second Life would cease to exist Linden Labs would probably find itself facing numerous claims of people who want either their online property restored, or a sizeable sum of money. How can you insure a company which owns a world?

And then They created an object
In Second Life objects are constantly created by users. These can be all sorts of things, from something such a piece of clothing up to an entire city (piece by piece). All of these objects have value. This means that there is constantly a creation of valuable goods taking place. The amount of money in Second Life is constantly increasing as a result of this: if User A creates a new house and offers this for 1000 Linden Dollars then he created a new object valued at 1000 Linden Dollars.

Increasing value
Since the virtual world constantly gains new objects the world becomes more valuable. How can you possible insure something that constantly increases in value? Since objects are rarely destroyed in Second Life the value is unlikely to drop. Would Linden Labs constantly have to be paying a constantly increasing sum of money for insurance every month?

More questions than answers
In this article I pose more questions than I give answer. The reason for that is because I simply don’t know. The most practical approach to the problem in the past would be to say: ok, insure the value of the servers, no more. However, since these servers constantly generate money (I’d like to have one of those by the way…) in the form of valuable objects being created they are becoming ever more valuable. The servers themselves become more valuable? No they don’t, but the data on those servers does. This perhaps defines the problem a little better, but it’s still quite hard to actually value the item.

Insuring a God: impossible?
I don’t know whether insuring a “God”; the developer of a virtual world, is possible since I’m not in the insurance branch. Therefore I can’t answer the question I posed in this article. When I find out more about the subject I’ll post that here.

Virtual Terror

Virtual Terror

Some time ago it became apparant that terrorist were using virtual worlds, and especially Second Life for training purposes. Since Second Life (SL) uses almost the same laws of physics they could probably train how to fly an aircraft into a building, for example. Another thing that could happen, since anything is possible in SL, is to create an explosive device in any form (car, bouquet of flowers, bench, gift etc.) to see how other objects are affected by the blast. Are these things we should be worried about?

Yes we should
In a sense, we should be afraid of these things. The more real the virtual world gets, the better it can serve as a trainingground for terrorists. In this sense we should be afraid. Terrorist could closely study the effects of bombs, attacks using vehicles,

No we shouldn’t
Why should we be afraid of this? Virtual worlds may prove to be a trainingground, they may not, we don’t exactly know. Since there isn’t any actual danger to human lives I don’t consider the threat to be that large. The fact that there aren’t human lives involved doesn’t exclude it from being terrorism, but the damage will probably be less when a virtual carbomb goes off than when an actual one does.

When is someting qualified as terrorism?
Another problem we are faced with is the question: what is terrorism? If a user in SL destroys someone elses property this doesn’t immediately qualify as terrorism. In my opinion it qualifies if users in the virtual world are scared. That is the goal of terrorism most of the time: to break the enemies will to fight. This is usually done by acts of extremely violence. When you lose something in a virtual world, do you actually get scared? Can terrorism even have the desired effect in a virtual world?

Who are the terrorists?
The next dilemma is the question who the terrorists are. It can be actual terrorists who are training in virtual worlds, or it can be persons who would never commit such an act in real life. Virtual Worlds originated from games, and games are traditionally used to entertain. Someone might find it entertaining to detonate a bomb in a virtual world for some strange reason.
It may also very well be that committing acts of terrorism in a virtual world prevent the user from actually committing them. This is basically the same discussion about whether shooting-games make people more violent, or whether the serve to prevent people from actually shooting persons in real life. To my knowlegde no research has been carried out in this field yet.

Conclusion
Is terrorism likely to happen in a virtual world? Well, that depends on your definition. It could happen, and virtual property could be destroyed or the virtual world could be used as a training ground. These are factors which could make terrorism in a virtual world viable. On the other hand, it’s just a game. Some people may not see it as such, but Virtual Worlds are still mostly to have fun. If people can blow off some steam by committing acts of terrorism instead of letting them do that in the real world, then I’d rather have them do it online where no one is actually physically hurt.

Interesting links:
All Academic – How terrorist use the virtual world

Taxing a virtual world

In most, if not in all virtual worlds there are transactions happening. People buy or sell mythical swords for unimaginable prices, virtual real estate is bought by a person and possibly rented by another, clothes are bought etc. Most of these transactions are unregulated. Unregulated in the sense that it is unclear whether the persons involved in the transactions are eligible to pay taxes to a national tax authority.

The object involved
To make an example of the virtual real estate in Second Life. The first question to be asked is: what is the object involved. Is it just “ones and zeroes” in a computer? Could it be computer data? Is it possibly some form of a virtual house?
The reason for asking these questions is because the classification of the object involved makes a world of difference on the type of tax involved. In The Netherlands there is a different tax regime for real estate than there is for any regular object like a DVD, a pack of cookies or a television.
One could argue that virtual property, like the virtual real estate is merely “normal” property, in which case it would fall under the normal tax regime of daily items.

Which nation

The second question which arises when thinking about the question of taxes in virtual worlds is the question which country would be authorized to tax the inhabitants of the virtual world. The US IRS (Internal Revenue Service) has claimed that they are looking into taxes in Second Life[1]. When trying to contact them about this, the person who spoke to us didn’t know where to find the information..

This “I don’t know exactly” attitude is common and understandable among the tax agencies. They are facing a new world which is all around the globe, where international transactions happen every day and they are unsure how to deal with this.

“Government: Keep out”[2]

As Sonia Arrison mentions in her article on Second Life and Virtual Property Tax Law: “Second Life is a game where people go to escape the real world”. With this she is makes a very strong case: people log in to Second Life to get away from their daily real-life lives. In the game they do not want to be confronted with paying not so virtual taxes to any government for the virtual property that they buy.

Anonymity

An extra issue is that the anonymity of the Internet, and with that the virtual world makes it nearly impossible to get a good fix on who is the seller and who is the buyer. Governmental agencies have the ability to find at which computer a person is by the means of the IP-address but this does not make the task of finding and taxing the right person any easier. For a nation who wishes to tax their own inhabitants it will be a lot of work to see whether the inhabitant of their country who was involved in the transaction was be the buyer or the seller, to then find the IP-address, then the person involved and then tax him.

Conclusion

Due to the huge amount of work, the enormous complexity of the virtual world and the internet, the transnational character of the transactions and the uncertainty of the type of object involved it is unlikely tax will be introduced to any virtual world in the near future.

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[1] Newspaper article on taxes in Second Life: http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/02/technology/sl_taxes/

[2] Sonia Arrison – Second Life and Virtual Property Tax law: http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/20790/Second_Life_and_the_Virtual_Property_Tax.html

Inheriting an online presence?

Imagine for a minute that a person in your family/friends/relations dies. That person has spent a lot of time online in his/her life and he/she has one or more avatar(s) (online presences in virtual worlds/games). The question is: can you inherit this?

Extension of self or separate tool?
One of the questions to be asked here, is whether the avatar is an merely an online version of you, an extension of yourself so to say, or only a separate “tool” so you can go about your business online.
It can be argued that the avatar is an extension of you: you use it, you influence its behavior so it is in fact you who is online, be it in a (possibly) different form: as an avatar. On the other hand you could say that the avatar is merely a tool to interact in virtual worlds. The avatar is nothing more than an extension of the tool “computer” which enables you to go online.

Following the first line of thought: the avatar is an extension of you, and as such a separate entity online, this would mean that it is a sort of legal form, an artificial legal personality online which can have rights, have property, buy and sell items etc. In the case that a real person dies and he leaves his avatar to you, you in fact inherit this legal personality, which would be like buying a company: you inherit all the items of the company/person.

If you follow the second line of thought: it’s an online tool, than that would mean that anything your avatar owns online is your property. The avatar itself is only a sort of “holding” for your online belongings. This means that if a real person dies, his belongings are his own, not his avatars. The interesting thing here is how to “divide” his belongings? If our recently deceased owns a house worth several thousand dollars in Second Life and you inherit this without having an account in Second Life, how can you inherit this?

The avatar never dies
There is also something to be said for the fact that you don’t inherit the items that are in the account of the deceased person, you inherit his avatar. On the other hand, how would this be possible? “Very easily: just hand over the password and the username” you might say. True enough, but what about the fact that this avatar is an online representation of the deceased? It could be considered identity-fraud in some strange sense. The avatar has friends in the virtual worlds, a reputation, perhaps even a lover. If you inherit the avatar as a whole, which means that you can log in under his name then this means that you actually inherit all of his relations and his reputation too. Can this be the thing that the deceased had in mind when he appointed you as heir of his avatar…?

The Privacy of an avatar

Privacy has always been an interesting subject. You can never quite get a grasp of what it is; it’s too hard to define. However, when people feel that their privacy is infringed in any way they are quick to take offense. This makes perfect sense: you have personal information and secrets, and what right do others have to know those things?

To connect this question to the virtual world: what about the privacy of virtual persons? By this I mean the privacy not of a person online, but the privacy of his or her avatar in a virtual world. If people can own things in Second Life for example, why can’t they have a right of privacy? It seems to be a basic right in most countries, so why not online?

However: privacy is often associated with a private domain: somewhere you can “be yourself”. How can an avatar be himself/herself? The avatar is only a virtual representation chosen by a human sitting at a computer. Does this make the avatar merely a tool of the user, or can it have virtual rights? If you have a house in a virtual world which you actually own, is this your private domain? Is that where you can have some privacy?

There is another way of looking at it though. Some of the virtual worlds are there for the social interaction. You sign up to Second Life to meet new people, to interact with other users. Why would you want to have privacy? If you want privacy, turn of the computer right? Well, that is true to some extent, but then you see the avatar as a tool, an extension of a human being on the internet, and not something that can have its own rights.

I’ll be waiting for the first lawsuit about the topic but I expect that that will be in a few years.

I hereby declare thee…

“In virtual sickness and in virtual health…”

As I’m reading up on the questions and challenges that Virtual Worlds pose to the Law, Arno Lodder brought a question to mind: can you marry in a virtual world. The first answer would be: why not? The underlying question is what is legally happening beneath the surface? Are we talking about two real persons who are marrying online in a virtual world? Are only their avatars getting married? Is this marriage legally sound?

Another interesting fact is the anonymity on the Internet: you never can be truly sure about who you’re dealing with. If you meet that special someone on Second Life and you decide to marry him or her, are you sure you’re marrying John from Canada or is it actually Carlos from Venezuela? Consider a world where there is no certainty about who you’re dealing with, and, as such, no idea who you married. What else is this marriage than an elaborate masquerade?

Next question: can two real life people or two avatars (representations) of the persons of the same sex get married? In some countries they can and in some they can’t. In our online virtual world there are little no boundaries. Does this mean that you can engage in multiple marriages? In most western countries the law states that you can only be married to one person at a time: monogamy. In other countries there is no such restriction. Does this then mean that you can have multiple online marriages if you live in a country where this is allowed whereas you can have only one marriage if there is the “monogamy-principle”?

I’m very interested in seeing the first online marriage and the first “I hereby declare thee virtually wed” and I’m even more interested in the legal effects this will have on the lives of the people involved.

When “God” goes bankrupt

In our modern day world of 2009 there are several virtual worlds. The most famous ones are probably Second Life and Habbo Hotel. Recently I read an interesting article on Terra Nova, which is a blog about Virtual Worlds, where the question was asked what would happen if the creator (usually a company) of a virtual world would go bankrupt.

To give an example: if Lindenlabs, the creator of Second Life went bankrupt, would it shut Second Life down? Furthermore, the company makes money on Second Life through property of virtual items. They rent virtual grounds to people who wish to build things on these virtual grounds thus creating an income.
The virtual worlds is in effect their property. Users who have a house in Second Life probably bought it using Linden Dollars, the currency in Second Life. This means that they actually paid for it. What would happen if Linden Labs went bankrupt? Would creditors be able to take damages from the virtual world? Would they in effect own the virtual world? Both legally and morally these are very interesting things to think about. What does happen when God (the creator of a virtual world) goes bankrupt…?

A changing economy, onto the world of Star Trek?

“You see, the economy of the 24th century is a bit different from what you’re used to. The pursuit of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We strive to better ourselves” – Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek First Contact.

The Star Trek fanatics among you will probably know this phrase. The interesting thing is that if you read between the lines in the newspapers today you can see that the global economy is changing. More and more people are realizing that the pursuit of wealth isn’t an ultimate goal, nor a nobel one. People are realizing that they can or should do something for the community. This is, is a way, contradictory to what it happening at the same time: individualization. Yet, people seem prepared to set aside their differences and individual goals and individual happiness to better a community. Are we truly heading into the world of Star Trek?