Foresight of evolving security threats posed by emerging technologies
Abstract
Purpose
Many emerging technologies are being developed in an accelerating pace and are key drivers of future change. In foresight studies, usually their positive impact on the quality of life is considered or their negative environmental effects. This paper seeks to draw attention to an overlooked “dark side” of new technologies: their potential abuse by terrorists or organized crime. Recent cybercrime events are examples of abuse that perhaps could have been minimized if appropriate foresight studies were performed years ago. This was the aim of the recently completed EU-funded project FESTOS.
Design/methodology/approach
Several foresight methodologies were employed. Following a horizon scanning for potentially threatening technologies, a Delphi-type expert survey helped to evaluate critical threat characteristics of selected 33 technologies: the likelihood that each technology will actually come to pose a security threat (in different time frames), the easiness of its malicious use, the severity of the threat, and the most threatened societal spheres.
Findings
The results enabled ranking the technologies by their “abuse potential” and “threat intensity”. Certain emerging technologies (or their combinations), regarded as “weak signals”, inspired ideas for potential “wild cards”. In a subsequent workshop, which employed a variant of the “futures wheel” method, four wild-card “scenario sketches” were constructed. These were later developed to full narrative scenarios.
Originality/value
The entire process enables the introduction of security foresight into policy planning in a long-range perspective. The foresight results were followed by the evaluation of policy implications and coping with the knowledge control dilemma. The paper illustrates how a mix of foresight methods can help in a continuous analysis of new and threats posed by emerging technologies, thus raising awareness of decision makers and mitigating the risk of unforeseen surprises.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to all FESTOS partners for their fruitful cooperation: Finland Future Research Centre (FFRC) at the University of Turku, Centre for Technology & Society (ZTG) at the Technical University of Berlin, EFP Consulting UK, and the University of Lodz, Poland. Members of three Millennium Project nodes were involved in the project: ICTAF (Israel, project coordinator), FFRC (Finland) and Dr K. Steinmüller of Z-punkt (Germany) as a partner in the team of ZTG. Received 21 May 2012. Revised 8 October 2012. Accepted 11 January 2013.
Citation
Hauptman, A. and Sharan, Y. (2013), "Foresight of evolving security threats posed by emerging technologies", Foresight, Vol. 15 No. 5, pp. 375-391. https://doi.org/10.1108/FS-05-2012-0036
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited