Obama erklärt: Cyberwar ist mehr wie Basketball als (American) Football

US-Präsident Barack Obama hat gerade eine kleine Interviewtournee durch Netzmedien hinter sich und war auch beim Techologieblog re/code zu Besuch. Dort gibt es ein Video und Transcript von seinem Interview: White House. Red Chair. Obama Meets Swisher.

We do our own hacking of other countries. There’s been lots of reports about the Iran nuclear system and things like that. Can we make a good argument that we should be protected against them, when we’re doing the same thing ourselves?

Obviously, I can’t talk about specifics and whether …

But please do. [Laugh]

… whether confirming or denying whatever you discuss. I mentioned in the CEO roundtable — a comment that was made by one of my national security team. This is more like basketball than football, in the sense that there’s no clear line between offense and defense. Things are going back and forth all the time. We have great capabilities here. But there are other countries that have great capabilities, as well. Eventually, what we’re going to need to do is to find some international protocols that, in the same way we did with nuclear arms, set some clear limits and guidelines, understanding that everybody’s vulnerable and everybody’s better off if we abide by certain behaviors. In the meantime, we have to have sufficient capability to defend ourselves.

Lustiger wird es nur noch beim Thema NSA, wo Deutschland auch namentlich genannt wird. Obama versteht die Debatte in Deutschland aber wohl nur unter dem Aspekt, dass hier Anti-Google-Stimmung verbreitet würde, weil deutsche Konzerne das mit dem Netz nicht so schnell kapiert hätten und jetzt den NSA-Skandal für ihre Interessen ausnutzen würden:

But it’s a global Internet world.

And that’s the point.

And they’re businesses.

And that has been the challenge. What is true — and I’ve said this publicly, so I’m not saying anything that’s classified in any way — our capacities to scoop up information became so great, and traditionally there haven’t been restraints on our intelligence community scooping up information from outside our borders and non-U.S. persons.

So what ended up happening was that, in places like Germany, this had a huge impact — not just on government-to-government relations, but suddenly all the Silicon Valley companies that are doing business there find themselves challenged, in some cases not completely sincerely. Because some of those countries have their own companies who want to displace ours.

I say all this to make the point that I think we have made real progress in narrowing the differences around the national security/privacy balance. There are still some issues like encryption that are challenging.

Was man leider sagen muss: Auch wenn ich weitgehend andere Ansichten habe, hat Obama hier mehr Inhaltliches zu Netzpolitik gesagt als wir von unseren Spitzenpolitikern gewöhnt sind.