Topic 2: Information and Telecommunications in the Context of International Security

Country: Mozambique
Committee: GA: Disarmament and International Security (DISC):
School: Skyview
Name: Alex Rodewald

The issue of the internet as a medium of international terrorism has been a growing concern for the last seven years. Ever since the launch of the internet for the consumer-oriented world, it has gone through cycles of strict governmental controls and deregulations concerning the content of message sent, and the way that different websites and services are being used. Certainly, the internet has become a great influence on almost the entire world, for better or for worse. The feasibility of extremely fast global communication has made the industrialized world much faster than it was even ten years ago, as it is now possible to send inconceivable amounts of data in mere minutes. However, the risk factor has also increased. Just as global communications between businesses and governments has improved, so has the ability of terrorists groups to coordinate their attacks and conspire against the powers that hold this organization together. With the many advances in data encryption technology, criminals on the internet become increasingly harder to trace, and disappear much more easily into the electronic background.

However, it would be quite a stretch to say that the internet has affected everyday life in all parts of the world. While it may be true that major businesses in every industrialized country on the planet have access to this global network, very few countries have widespread civilian access. In Mozambique, it’s an amazing thing for most families to have a television, let alone a computer, let alone access to the internet. Regardless of our technological inferiority, so to speak, terrorism and crime have done nothing but rise in our country as well. In fact, we would go so far as to say that the lack of the sort of technology that is available to countries such as the United States has made organized crime even easier in our part of the world, since guerrillas and terrorists are able to use 2004 tactics in a 1964 environment.

Mozambique feels that more focus should be placed on tracking and eliminating the terrorists and criminals themselves, rather than searching the great and mighty internet for activity that may be suspicious. We believe that money spent on a first-world solution to a third-world problem is money wasted, and that it is almost an insult to assume that just because another nation is more industrialized and commercialized than our own automatically means that the threats to its people are more grave. What’s more, the money that would be spent on efforts to regulate internet traffic could be better spent on fulfilling the most basic needs of people not only in Mozambique, but all around the world. People live with no homes, food, clothing or water every day, but the higher powers in world government spend time arguing about spending precious funds on a problem that only affects the first-world. Any resolution supporting control of the internet rather than actually locating and neutralizing terrorist threats in the real world is a slight to the men and women who die every day due to terrorism and unorganized, illegal rebellion, as well as negligent of other, more serious problems in the world, and Mozambique will not stand for it.