It's Open Season on the Tech Elite

From the title you could be forgiven for thinking that this is another article about how rich, opinionated and obnoxious tech CEOs are becoming global objects of scorn. And there is definitely a story there.

But that is not this one.

Twitter co-founder and board chair Jack Dorsey along with other Twitter employees apparently received what amounted to death threats from ISIS last week. This should not come as a surprise, and neither should it be regarded as a joke.

Twitter - as well as Facebook and Google and several others have been targeted before: by North Korea, Russia, Turkey and China (where Google is still not available). In fact, any totalitarian organization rightly fears the open distribution of information that may run counter to its own versions of the 'truth.'

ISIS is about as violent and sick a cult as we are likely to see in our lifetimes. But it is also extraordinarily well organized, successful and tech savvy. As we saw with Sony's response to threats due to the release of the movie "The Interview" western businesses tend to prefer conflict avoidance (at least of the kind that doesnt involve lawyers). Sony capitulated immediately. And those threats were vague; barely credible.

The point is that tech has become central to the functioning of any enterprise which hopes to have an impact on the world - whether social, political or financial. That's a validation of its success and a great opportunity. But with it comes responsibility and risk. Which means thought must be given to managing those risks. Because as the following article explains, businesses are rarely profiles in courage. JL

John Robb comments in the Global Guerrillas blog:

Charlie Hebdo showed the world that terrorism is evolving and corporate targeting on global scale is now on the agenda. This means an attack on a tech CEO isn't just possible, but probable.
Battles between the corporate allies of hollow nation-states and the gangs and tribes of black globalization are at the center of this century's epochal war.  That war will eventually put the senior executives of US tech and financial companies in the crosshairs.  Here's a good example.  Over the weekend, ISIS threatened the life of Jack Dorsey, a co-founder and Chairman of Twitter.  Why?  Twitter, at the urging of the US government, has been shutting down the accounts of ISIS supporters for months.  So, ISIS supporters responded by making a threat with a nifty graphic:

We told you from the beginning it’s not your war, but you didn't get it and kept closing our accounts on Twitter, but we always come back. But when our lions come and take your breath, you will never come back to life

The CEO as an Objective of War
Unfortunately for the suits in Silicon Valley, ISIS isn't as much of a pushover as al Qaeda was. They have mass and momentum and they are smart enough to understand the role of the Internet in this struggle.  Additionally, they have lots of experience coercing CEOs and other senior executives.  They did it quite a bit of it during the war in Iraq (and it worked).
Regardless, the targeted killing of a well known tech executive in sunny California by ISIS jihadis does appear impossible to imagine. Few places are more remote from each other, and not just geographically. Silicon Valley is a hyperconnected, financially mainlined zone striving for a tech nirvana. ISIS is a disconnected autonomous zone striving to return to the 7th Century. However, that's probably a bad assumption.   Charlie Hebdo showed the world that terrorism is evolving and corporate targeting on global scale is now on the agenda. This means an attack on a tech CEO isn't just possible, but probable. Worse, once an attack on a senior tech executive happens, future threats will be instantly credible and highly coercive.
If that occurs, we are going to find out very quickly that the corporation, and particularly tech companies, are particularly bad organizations for warfare.  One reason is that they are too centralized.  In particular, the institution of the CEO is a grave weakness (a systempunkt in global guerrilla lingo).  The CEO's centrality to the corporate network makes him/her a single point of failure for the entire organization.  Another is that executives in most of the western world are very soft targets.  Easy to find (Google and Google maps), easy to isolate, and easy to kill...