Book Review by Clay Calvert, University of Florida

From Journalism Quarterly
September 2014 vol. 91 no. 3   617-619

Book Review: The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation: The Constitutional Foundations of the Aspirational Society, by Narain D. Batra

The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation: The Constitutional Foundations of the Aspirational Society. Narain D. Batra Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. 255 pp. $75 hardback

http://jmq.sagepub.com.library.norwich.edu/content/91/3/617.full

By Clay Calvert
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. USA

Discovering the truth, voting wisely, and realizing one’s identity; it is a trio of well-established justifications for protecting speech under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, corresponding, respectively, to free-expression theories known as the marketplace of ideas, democratic self-governance, and autonomy/human dignity.

To this list, Narain D. Batra now adds another important free-speech value—innovation—in his timely and example-packed tome, The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation. A professor of communications at Norwich University in Vermont who also writes for media outlets in India, Batra’s thesis in his latest book is clear: The First Amendment provides Americans with the essential cultural environment, the primordial soup or the embryonic conditions, for innovations to develop regardless of the process, whether it is recombinant, serendipitous, or simply someone fiddling and tinkering in the garage or with the iPad.

Citing and channeling Justice Louis Brandeis’ 1927 contention from Whitney v. California that “it is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears,” Batra asserts that the First Amendment “creates spaces for innovative behavior by freeing us from irrational fears (whether it is stem cell research for life enhancement or redefining the idea of marriage by applying the Fourteenth Amendment to gay marriage rights).”

But the First Amendment and the culture of innovation it facilitates are only two of the necessary conditions for making the United States an aspirational society. The other variables, Batra believes, are a steady influx of immigrants that produces “brain flow” and an open economic marketplace (not simply a metaphorical marketplace of ideas). Simply put, it takes free speech, free markets and freed—not free—brains.

One strength of this book is the author’s ability to surf the pop-cultural realm to illustrate larger points about free speech, communication technologies, innovation and aspirational society. On page 22, we find erstwhile California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger landing in hot political and cultural waters for a Saturday Night Live-infused crack about special interests, unions, and trial lawyers being “girlie men.” Exactly sixty pages later, we catch singer-actress Courtney Love diving into a very different cauldron of hot water for tweeting allegedly defamatory remarks about a clothing designer. And then there is Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, characterized as “a most spectacular materialization of the myth of the aspirational society.”

But these references are not to say that the book fails to approach its topics with gravitas. Batra’s chapter on China is excellent and, from an American perspective, almost exceedingly optimistic. He ends it by pondering whether China “has the unique cultural power to challenge the United States and the West.” Batra concludes it does not. “Authoritarian China cannot handle political freedom because it does not have the American cultural capabilities to do so,” Batra writes, adding that “the source of the unique American cultural capabilities is the First Amendment freedoms, which China cannot import without transforming itself into a different society, one that will closely resemble the United States.”

In other places, Batra’s optimism is tempered by realism. While stressing that a free market is necessary for an aspirational society, Batra openly acknowledges and analyzes corporate corruption, observing that, when left unchecked by a vigorous press, free market capitalism “can cause global havoc.”

He laments that “traditional news media organizations are either incapable of understanding the workings of Wall Street firms . . . or are prone to collusion with them through bribery, insider trading, careerism, or intimidation.” But even here there still is some optimism. In this atmosphere, Batra contends, “the public has no choice but to welcome and embrace a free-floating, footloose, beyond national-cyberorganization such as WikiLeaks.” Indeed, it is WikiLeaks that “presents the greatest challenge to traditional media’s investigative role in society.” WikiLeaks enables transparency, which, in turn, allows a check to be placed on government abuses.

And Batra has not given up hope for the news media to play an important role in what he calls “the age of WikiLeaks,” especially if journalists reprioritize their agendas.

If American journalists pay as much attention to Wall Street and global financial institutions as they pay to Hollywood gossip and sex scandals of politicians and sports celebrities, perhaps it would be possible to foresee and prevent the next crisis.

While journalism professors everywhere would surely endorse such a shift, one must wonder whether the audience would even pay attention. And if the audience will not pay attention, then there is little financial incentive for such a change in coverage.

Among his strengths, Batra knows how to turn clever, memorable, and inspiring phrases about the importance of the First Amendment. Free-speech scholars going forward likely will cite and sprinkle some of these chestnuts into their own writing when addressing the power and purposes of the First Amendment. Consider, for instance: “if history has a pattern of decline and fall, then the First Amendment is the monkey wrench that breaks the pattern”; “the First Amendment, one of the greatest human utterances ever uttered, is a great disrupter, and it breaks the deterministic pattern of history”; “the First Amendment . . . has become a kind of evergreen field of dreams”; and “the First Amendment is the enemy of sacred cows.” In brief, the First Amendment is a monkey wrench, great disrupter, field of dreams, and enemy of sacred cows all rolled into one.

Ultimately, Batra makes a valuable contribution not only to the literature on free expression, but also to the workings of modern American society. With time, the innovation value of the First Amendment might well take its place alongside established First Amendment theories.

India Needs More Than BRICS

From The Diplomat

Their new bank notwithstanding, the BRICS grouping is unlikely to help the Indian economy fulfill its potential.

By Narain Batra

August 01, 2014

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The BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) and theContingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA), which were established at the Brazil summit, could not have rescued the Indian rupee when it went into tailspin in 2013, even if the bank had existed at that time. No outside financial institution can save an economy in the doldrums or help it to withstand risks from international financial turbulence except its own policies.

It was the credibility and the deft monetary hand of Raghuram Rajan, the Chicago University economist and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor, who rescued the rupee by immediately taking a number of steps to help increase the country’s foreign exchange reserves, including proclaiming a new provision to attract foreign currency non-resident dollar funds and inflation-indexed bonds to discourage gold buying. The bold initiative helped the RBI to mobilize almost $34 billion in funding and stabilized the rupee.

The New Development Bank, with its meager capitalization of $50 billion and another $100 billion for the FCR should not raise false hopes in India. As Raj M. Desai and James Vreeland of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University wrote in The Washington Post: Not all such regional banking efforts have been altogether successful in the past.

In 1970, for example, Andean nations established the Development Bank of Latin America, in order to mitigate the stringent rules imposed by the World Bank on infrastructure loans. This has been a success story.

But in a similar venture in May 2000, more or less as a reaction to a widely perceived failure of the IMF to halt currency speculation during the Asian Crisis, ASEAN nations along with China, South Korea and Japan established bilateral currency swap agreements, now known as Chiang Mai Initiative. It never got off the ground. Nor did the Bank of the South, established in 2009 by seven Latin American countries to fund regional development.

These efforts were initiated partly as a response to the IMF enforcement of strict conditions on countries seeking emergency loans. To be legitimate, effective, and successful the BRICS bank will have to follow international rules of transparency, accountability and monitoring as well as loan practices as stringent as those of IMF and World Bank; in which case the Bricks bank will become indistinguishable from them.

Moreover, as Desai and Vreeland pointed out: “China’s dominant position makes coordination – in terms of operations and funding priorities – difficult to imagine. At one point, all other BRICS countries have expressed concern with Beijing’s economic policies and currency regime.”

India needs more than BRICS finance. It needs a massive inflow of technology through foreign direct investment (FDI) to build infrastructure, reliable and abundant electric power, highways, harbors, airports, high-speed railroads, irrigation, and water supply. It also needs FDI to speed up manufacturing for export in order to create a current account surplus, which will build foreign exchange reserves and strengthen the rupee.

When a country exports high quality goods and services it also exports its culture, which enhances its reputation and builds its soft power.

While foreign institutional investment is speculative and can be withdrawn, as happened in 2013 with the U.S. Federal Reserve’s taper, FDI is for the long term and brings in foreign technology. FDI shows the extent to which global corporations trust a country’s manufacturing power.

Think of the Taiwanese multinational contract manufacturing company Foxconn, which has invested billions in China to manufacture the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, BlackBerry, PlayStation and other electronic goods. Foxconn cannot just walk away from China. Rather it enhances China’s reputation as a manufacturing hub. With about $4 trillion foreign exchange reserve (of which $1.3 trillion is held in U.S. Treasuries) built on this kind of manufacturing, China’s renminbi will not come under attack. China does not need the BRICS bank, which is to be established in Shanghai, though eventually China might use it to advance its economic diplomacy in Africa, Southeast Asia, where it is aggressively pursuing its territorial disputes, and elsewhere.

Russia, which recently struck a 10-year $400 billion gas deal with China, could use a powerful international platform like BRICS to face off against Brussels and Washington in Ukraine and other global hotspots.

Although in some ways the creation of the NDB and CRA is a desirable attempt to challenge the West’s dominance of the global financial order and push for meaningful reforms at the IMF, World Bank, and other international financial institutions, India should not allow its growing international stature to be co-opted by China and Russia for their own national interests and global ambitions, whether it’s the Beijing Consensus or the Eurasian Economic Union.

To transform India into a global manufacturing power with long-term sustainable growth of 9-10 percent, India needs to develop bilateral relations with countries boasting cutting-edge technological prowess: Japan, South Korea, Germany, Britain, France, Israel and the United States, rather than pursue the Goldman Sachs-created fiction of the BRICS, a random grouping of countries that have neither the inner coherence nor the collective vision to achieve a global economic power shift.

Narain Batra, the author of The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation, is working on a new book, India after India: From Nehru to Narendra Modi. He is professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University, U.S.

Dartmouth experiments with future

Burlington Free Press

Dartmouth experiments with future

Narain Batra 12:11 a.m. EDT May 11, 2014

Calculus and Shakespeare are forever but what will be the shape of Dartmouth when the school celebrates its 250th anniversary in 2019? Dr. Phil Hanlon who assumed the college presidency last year has a plan: cluster the faculty brainpower and create experiential learning for students, among other initiatives.

The purpose of developing faculty clusters, teacher-researchers who straddle across disciplines and push the boundaries of traditional thinking is to tackle society’s most troublesome challenges through collaboration. The hope is that disruption of boundaries might result in disruptive innovation if, let’s say, information technology, humanities, business and politics were to cohabitate.

American society has become more open and tolerant of diversity. But academicians live in intellectual silos, most of us publishing in journals that very few people read outside our disciplines.

Bring down the walls; but what better place to do than Dartmouth where bold and innovative thinking is not an uncommon phenomenon. Think of the most recent: the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science, which has generated a trailblazing new field of graduate study, promoting international collaboration between researchers and medical practitioners to develop new models of low-cost high-quality health care.

Across-the-discipline collaborations from diverse areas leads to opening up of what the evolutionary biologist Stuart A. Kauffman called as “the adjacent possible,” the door that opens unto another door and creates new possibilites. That’s the potential of cluster faculty.

The cluster hiring initiative that began at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1998 and later was adopted by several universities is now receiving global attention because our problems are global in scope and scale. But it is never too late for Dartmouth, UVM, Middlebury and Norwich to explore its potential, building on the strength of their core disciplines, and challenge their faculty and students to work out solutions to mankind’s big messy problems through collaboration and pooling of multidisciplinary brainpower amplified by digital technologies.

Digital technologies not only can enhance the collective brainpower of the clustered faculty but they can also facilitate the personalization of learning via online learning platforms such as massive open online courses (MOOCs). But in the emerging environment of MOOCs, when Johnny Digital doesn’t have to go to the classroom, experiential learning becomes absolutely necessary.

Experiential learning, popularized by educational psychologist David A. Kolb, is a holistic approach where knowledge is gained through reflective observation and hands-on do-it-yourself experimentation. Students learn outside the classroom where a sponsoring organization provides structured programs to supplement their classroom academic experience leading to enrichment of learning and skills. It’s the site where the Millennials (Pew Research Center calls them: “Confident. Connected, Open to Change”) interact with the Boomers (Always worried about retirement and health care).

How to bring experiential learning to hundreds of undergraduate students in the age of MOOCs is going to be a big challenge especially for Dartmouth and Vermont schools because of their isolation from metro areas, places where students normally find opportunities for experiential learning, on-the-training jobs and internships.

Dartmouth has embraced MOOCs and digital learning, which according to MIT president L. Rafael Reif, “is the most important innovation in education since the printing press.” The printing press broke up the stranglehold of the religious establishment and liberated the European mind. Digital learning is questioning us as to why we teach the way we do. Why does Jane Digital have to spend four years on the UVM campus?

Changing four-year on-campus undergraduate learning to a blended three-year on-campus and one-year off-campus supervised experiential learning model will result in highly employable youth. Most of all it will free the faculty from excessive routine teaching and enable them to collaborate across disciples and schools to do research on society’s pressing problems.

Narain Batra, of Hartford, is author of The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation, teaches digital media, law, ethics, and criticism, as well as diplomacy at Norwich University.

Building the "India Cloud"

The country needs to protect its data from international spying and develop a competitive advantage in data security

Narain D Batra  

April 27, 2014 Last Updated at 21:48 IST

From Business Standard


India is a big data nation. Consider the magnitude of a Unique Identification Number for more than a billion people, Indian pharmaceuticals' worldwide ambitions to provide inexpensive drugs, information technology (IT) industry servicing the corporate global, just to name a few.

India needs to not only protect its data from international spying; it must also grab a fair share of the growing global cloud-computing infrastructure market, as it has done in software and consulting services. Major Indian IT companies, perhaps in partnership with the public sector and the states, could pool their resources and digital brains to build a cloud for India that's as secure and impenetrable as Swiss banks. There's a fortune in security.

According to a report for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the global market for cloud services is likely to grow from $148.8 billion in 2014 to $207 billion in 2016. But this projection should be considered in a wider context of the McKinsey & Company's report, "Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy," which estimates that the cumulative economic impact of cloud-based services and technology could be $1.7 trillion to $6.2 trillion annually in 2025. There is an unfathomable fortune in the cloud. What will be India's share?

The European Union (EU) has woken up to the challenge and is planning to build its own cloud. Even before the National Security Agency (NSA) disclosures about surveillance, some European officials were worried that data stored in American IT companies' clouds were not safe from the US government. The European Commissioner for Digital Affairs, Neelie Kroes, for example, has argued that cloud computing's immense benefits to economy depend on two things: first, scale and second, trust in the data that must be stored protectively. Scale is important because if each nation has its own cloud-computing services then it becomes very expensive. And since the EU is a large geopolitical and economic bloc, it can certainly create its own cloud-computing infrastructure. And, of course, that is true of India too with its intellectual resources and global digital footprints.

Most importantly, cloud infrastructure needs to create trust. Total data protection is a legitimate expectation of doing cloud-based business. If international businesses or governments think that they might be spied on, as has been the case with the NSA's ubiquitous spying, the trust in the cloud infrastructure will be diminished.

Kroes rightly asserts that "Privacy is not only a fundamental right; it can also be a competitive advantage. Companies focused on privacy need to start coming forward into the light…. That includes European companies who should take advantage of interest to provide services with better privacy." And the best way to accomplish this objective is for the EU to build its own cloud infrastructure as the European Cloud Partnership Board has recommended. Recently Angela Merkel, Germany's Chancellor, whose cell phone was tapped by the NSA, made a similar proposal.

The idea to create an alternative system to American cloud infrastructure - just as in the 1960s when European countries established the European Space Agency to compete with the National Aeronautic and Space Administration and a European consortium aircraft manufacturing company, Airbus, to compete with Boeing - is very tempting.

American IT companies that control 85 per cent of the global cloud computing market, are seriously concerned about the threat to their business. In an open letter to US President Barack Obama, major tech giants voiced serious concern over the government vacuuming their consumers' data for national security reasons.

They asked the government to ensure that "surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight." They asked that the government's authority to collect users' information be limited; and it should be based on transparency and subject to oversight and accountability. In order to enable the free flow of information and avoid international conflicts, it is necessary to build "a robust, principled, and transparent framework to govern lawful requests for data across jurisdictions, such as improved mutual legal assistance treaty or MLAT processes. Where the laws of one jurisdiction conflict with those of another, it is incumbent upon governments to work together to resolve the conflict."

Unfortunately, IT companies' concerns have seized neither the US president's or the US Congress' imagination. Even the recently announced disclosure rules by the Obama administration that will allow internet companies, in a very limited way, to inform their customers about the data asked by the government will not restore complete trust.

The loss of trust is compelling Europe to build its own cloud. But what can India do? There are two ways for Indian IT companies to protect their burgeoning global market for cloud-computing services. They can allow customers to move their data to servers outside the US that promise high-level protection, for example, Swisscom's proposed "Swiss Cloud" in Switzerland, where extreme secrecy is highly valued. Or Indian IT companies could federate and collaborate as a consortium to build the "India Cloud" that not only keeps Indian big data absolutely secure, but also creates business opportunities for them in the growing data-security market. Bangalore should shout from the housetop: you can trust us.

I'm tempted to say: if India can launch the Mars Orbiter Mission with a paltry sum of $75 million, it can certainly build its own secure cloud that creates total trust and sucks in billions of dollars of global business as well as generate thousands of new jobs. In the digital age, India needs to think big and bold. India must compete.


The writer is professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University, US and the author of The First Freedoms and America's Culture of Innovation

India’s Growth Story Needs a New Actor

From The Diplomat

 India’s Growth Story Needs a New Actor

The country needs to go beyond its current IT sector in developing knowledge workers.

By Narain D. Batra
March 22, 2014

India is facing the challenge of a new industrial age, a software-powered intelligent-machine world that needs highly skilled workers. The nature of work is being transformed because smart machines can do more than repetitive tasks. A dozen highly trained workers, for example, can run an entire garment factory in India, Bangladesh or China. Intelligent machines have very high productivity but they do need intelligent workers, albeit fewer and fewer, who can operate complex hi-tech devices.

A young country like India clearly has plenty of workers, but without high-quality education the so-called demographic dividend could become a demographic nightmare. Indian graduates without information technology skills will be competing with skilled labor in other countries for wages under constant downward pressure. India needs to raise its bar very high. As President Pranab Mukherjee said recently at a Himachal Pradesh university campus, “Our universities have to be the breeding ground for creative pursuits. They have to be the source of cutting edge technological developments.”  These ideas should be implemented not only at the university level; they should be pushed down to the lower rungs of school education.

A decade ago India announced the establishment of the National Knowledge Commission, “on matters relating to institutions of knowledge production, knowledge use and knowledge dissemination.” It was recognition of the fact that – like the United States, Germany, Japan, and other developed countries – India was moving towards an information technology and knowledge-based economy. Much has changed since then.

Today, knowledge means the ability to work with ever increasing computer intelligence and smart software systems that operate and control everything from hospital diagnostics to railroad systems. A knowledge worker today is a highly creative person who feels comfortable working with and manipulating intelligent software and smart machines. As economist Tyler Cowen says, average is over. If you cannot get to the top, there’s plenty of space at the bottom of the pyramid.

The technologically advanced economy of today is a triangulation of cutting-edge technical knowledge, a highly skilled labor force and venture capital. But the driving force is the knowledge software produced by information technology workers who develop innovations that make labor and capital more efficient – the kind of knowledge that is being generated in India’s technology parks. Unfortunately this very knowledge will reduce if not totally eliminate the need for low-skilled workers. The demographic dividend will become an illusion unless India undergoes an education revolution at the grassroots level.

On the bright side, a handful of technology-based knowledge producing cities, including Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune and Gurgaon, could positively influence the whole country. Technology-based knowledge, unlike capital and labor, is inexhaustible and is “non-rivalrous,” as economists say, and should become the foundation of massively available mass education in India. Let every Indian high school student learn computer programming, a discipline that requires learning mathematics, logical analysis, problem formulation and building step-by-step solutions called algorithms. Programming is a highly creative art form as well as a problem-solving strategy. Catch them young, as they say. The greater the challenge to young people, the greater will be the response.

Teaching computer intelligence, programming languages, as well as the English language, to students from disadvantaged communities in India, to paraphrase Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt’s ideas, will turn them into knowledge workers and lift them out of poverty. It will also supply a steady stream of knowledge workers to the IT sector, without which it would be scrambling to retain workers by offering them stock options and other incentives, which may in the long run prove nonproductive and even disastrous, potentially also increasing inequality in India and adding to social tensions.

The low-hanging fruit of 8-9 percent annual growth is perhaps over. Economic growth in India will come not so much from the stock market but rather from those industries where the knowledge worker, someone who can work with sophisticated machines and complex software, would be as important as the financier or the venture capitalist; for example, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry where the gestation period is long and rewards for workers cannot be stock-market driven. Economic growth can be sustainable if workers keep learning how to manage manufacturing systems whose embedded intelligence can be constantly improved.

India should employ its knowledge advantage in the cutting-edge field of intelligent software and robotic machines to create an environment where entrepreneurs and venture capitalists grow and accept the challenge of the unexpected, the road less travelled.

India’s policymakers need to strategize on ways the marketplace, apart from universities and institutes of technology, could be harnessed to create knowledge that generates innovation that can sustainably boost India’s growth. The kind of growth that becomes what economists, such as New York University Stern School of Business Professor Paul Romer and others, call “a virtuous circle.” But at the center of this virtuous circle has to be the highly trained worker who can teach machines and learn from them.

Dr. Narain Batra, professor of communications and diplomacy at Norwich University (U.S), is the author of The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation. He is currently working on a book on India.

Protecting the Digital Domain

The importance of cyberspace is such that it cannot be left undefended

From The Diplomat

By Narain D. Batra

January 24, 2014

If the Internet had been created in China or the Soviet Union, its architecture would have been very different. America created cyberspace in its own image: free, open, decentralized, distributed and self-governing.

Unfortunately its very openness and freedom have become the source of its vulnerability. Authoritarian nations, whether secular or theocratic, find freedom of cyberspace very threatening. And they are trying to build firewalls to protect their societies from freedom; or attack the U.S. to cripple its systems.

A most intriguing feature of cyberspace is that its threshold of entrance is so low that a self-trained person with access to computer can create apps and new platforms; or become a hacker and get into financial or military systems without leaving a trace. Terrorists and rogue states use footloose hackers to damage others’ infrastructures, spy and steal their intellectual property, or pry into their diplomatic and strategic plans.

On his way to the Shangri-La Security Dialogue in Singapore on June 1, 2013, the U.S. Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel described the cyber security threats as “quiet, stealthy, insidious,” not only to the United States but also other nations. “Rules of the road” are necessary to protect cyberspace, the domain into which all our activities, military, economic, commercial, political and cultural activities are being done now.

This fear is not irrational because power grids, financial systems and defense networks could be brought down by not only hostile states but also non-state actors acting alone or in collusion with their patron states. Most importantly, one of the most precious assets, intellectual property, could be stolen.

Last May the U.S. Defense Department reported to Congress that Chinese hackers had accessed the designs of some major U.S. weapons systems to modernize its military. The hacking according to the report was “attributable directly to the Chinese government and military.”

NATO systems, particular the systems used to coordinate military actions among the 28 allied nations, also face frequent computer attacks. The attacks on the security of cyber-dependent European nations are diverse in nature and origin. They range from simple distributed-denial-of-service attacks that make websites inaccessible to strikes that can cause physical destruction to vital installations.

But attacks can come from anywhere. A case in point is Estonia. In 2007, the Baltic country was subjected to a large, sustained cyber attack that lasted several days and paralyzed its commerce. The cyber attack was thought to have originated in Russia, but it couldn’t be determined who was responsible.

In 2008, Georgia came under Russian cyber attack during their war over the dispute regarding South Ossetia. Although the attack was limited to disabling a few Georgian government websites, it was ominous, however, as to what might happen in the future if hostilities were to erupt between any two nations.

The knowledge and technology needed to conduct cyber attacks are easily accessible. Today most perpetrators can conceal their location thanks to the anonymous nature of the Internet. Given current technology, attribution of cyber attacks is problematic.

But the cyber age is the age of big data and data mining software is being developed to pinpoint and locate the perpetrator. Mandiant, an American computer security company, reported last May that a unit of the People’s Liberation Army, APT I, Unit 61398, located in Shanghai has “systematically stolen hundreds of terabytes of data” from American corporations, organizations and government agencies. They stole “product blueprints, manufacturing plans, clinical trial results, pricing documents, negotiation strategies and other proprietary information from more than 100 of Mandiant’s clients, predominantly in the United States.”

What can be done? The United States has been droning al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen and Pakistan and sent Navy Seals to Abbottabad to kill Osama bin Laden. What can be done with hackers if they originate from Iran, Russia or China?

The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, an independent commission, has issued an interesting report. The report says, “Intellectual Property (IP) theft needs to have consequences, with costs sufficiently high that state and corporate behavior and attitudes that support such theft are fundamentally changed.” 

The most intriguing recommendation is this: “without damaging the intruder’s own network, companies that experience cyber theft ought to be able to retrieve their electronic files or prevent the exploitation of their stolen information.”

And, the report recommends, “both technology and law must be developed to implement a range of more aggressive measures that identify and penalize illegal intruders into proprietary networks, but do not cause damage to third parties.”

This is a call for limited and calculated private retaliation. But will it work? Could Google, for example, fight the People’s Liberation Army of China? Yes, Google could have retaliated in 2010 when it faced cyber attacks and censorship of its search results but the company wisely decided to leave China and moved its operations to Hong Kong.

One would think that Silicon Valley software wizards must have developed foolproof encryption systems to protect themselves and their data. But last year’s revelations by former contractor Edward Snowden that the NSA has been having unlimited access to information about U.S. citizens and foreigners has made such claims dubious.

The NSA conducts surveillance under the authority of a most secretive court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). It collects metadata from telephone companies and Internet data from Internet Service Providers. Under other secretive programs, such as Boundless Informant and PRISM, the NSA has been carrying out global surveillance, including on major world leaders. U.S. President Barack Obama in his recent address at the Justice Department has vowed to modify the surveillance program but not give it up totally because he, and many in Congress, consider NSA’s operations to be indispensable not only for national security but also for global security.

With so much surveillance power, why can’t the NSA give Americans complete cyber security? The answer is simple: No single system is good enough to offer such a thing.

Information technology companies must develop weapons of self-protection and must be allowed to use them, which will require amendments to he existing laws. Most importantly, the marketplace for cyber security systems must be incentivized to grow.

The three pillars of cyber security are: the National Security Agency but only under the close scrutiny of lawmakers, courts, and the news media; lawful cyber tools of active defense; and last but not least, a highly developed cyber security marketplace.

Cyberspace has been called the fifth domain: land, air, water, space, and now cyberspace, and it’s evolving. America like rest of the world has become a cyberspace-dependent nation. Cyberspace is going to define the future of humanity. It cannot be left alone as the Wild West.

Dr. Batra is author of The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) and a professor of communication and diplomacy at Norwich University. He is working on a new book, India Must: Compete or Perish.