Experience in the geography layer also informs a sense of who is responsible for what. Cyberspace cannot ignore the reality that laws, policies, and treaties that govern human affairs are almost always tied to geography. This reality becomes particularly challenging when trying to sort out which laws pertain to property that is shared across countries or, more significantly, what jurisdiction pertains to an activity that crosses space and time in milliseconds, only to take a different route seconds later.
A case in point helps to illustrate this challenge. If a person in country A (for instance, the imaginary nation of Inglisia) hacks into a computer in country B (the imaginary country of Quadeland) and uses that hacked machine to attack computers in a third country (the United States), then which laws and property rights pertain? Can the victim who owns the US-based machine reach out and hack back at the machine in Quadeland? If so, do the laws of the United States or Quadeland apply? What if the victim is a resident of a fourth country? In this way, rules based on geography quickly break down and require a model that allows users to work across borders, a model that must satisfy the highest common denominator of the expectations of privacy, due diligence, and other user expectations embodied in the laws of the various jurisdictions. The issue of jurisdiction in cyberspace is only now being reconciled to the physical (based on geography) and practical (how it really works) realities of cyberspace.
The People Layer
The top layer reflects the fact that people are an integral component of cyberspace. Indeed, people (rather than technology) explain the dynamic, ever-changing nature of cyberspace as users employ its various capabilities in ways that depart from, and even confound, the expectations of component, software, and system designers.
There are several important implications attendant to this layer of the model under discussion. First, while constitutions, laws, and policies typically allocate rights to people based on their citizenship or physical location, cyberspace allocates access and privileges based on the identities formed and authenticated in cyberspace. The old joke of one dog saying to another that “on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog” remains truer than not across broad swaths of the domain. Although there is often a reconciliation of a person's status between the physical and virtual worlds, cyberspace rules prevail in the determination of privilege in accessing resources in and through cyberspace. This reality makes the application of laws defined in the physical world to its cyberdoppelgänger challenging, especially when identities in cyberspace are spoofed or are indeterminate as a result of the users' employment of applications designed to cloak their identity so that their actions can be taken without attribution (sometimes referred to as “anonymity” features). This is not to say that the distinctions defined in the physical world do not matter, or that they do not have jurisdiction in cyberspace, but merely that it is often difficult, and sometimes impossible, to identify users or assign attribution within the current capabilities of cyberspace. This difficulty has significant implications for any desire to attribute actions in cyberspace so that identification of who took a certain action can be achieved and serve as a basis for meting out the appropriate rewards or consequences attendant to the action.
The Circuit Layer
The circuit layer of the model depicts the literal pathways that communications take to make their way from one place to another within cyberspace. Taken together with the geography and people layers of the unfolding model, this layer represents the sum total of what would have once been referred to as the telecommunications domain.
Long before the advent of the computers, sophisticated software, and ubiquitous wireless devices that power today's Internet, the telecommunications domain offered a simple and reliable means for a given communication to be sent and received across far-flung stretches of the earth. In that day and age, the flow of communications was still directly and manually controlled by human beings. A person would literally choose whether, when, and how a message would be sent by dialing a phone, faxing a message, or keying a microphone to initiate a communication. The communication would then flow from one location to its destination along a generally straight line, often a dedicated path (or link), and would be immediately received by the intended recipient on the other end. In effect, the communication would be manually pushed from one location to another and would be at risk of disclosure to a third party only during the time it was in transit. Before and after the transmission, the communication would reside in a sanctuary of sorts: In a person's mind, in a desk drawer, or if need be, in a safe.
As the Internet began to spread its web using these same methods of communication and as the means of transmission, storage, and presentation to communicants around the world increased exponentially in variety, scope, and scale, the telecommunications domain was transformed in several important ways.
First, decisions about when and how communications would flow across the spaces between two communicants were delegated to computers embedded with increasing regularity in communication and storage devices.
Second, communications were stored for later retrieval by intended recipients or as “on the web” resources for the sender. Some readers may recall that the initial novelty of email was less in the fact that it connected two people living great distances from each other than in the fact that it allowed people to communicate without both having to be “on line” at the same time. The communication would simply wait for the intended recipient to request access to the stored communication—forever, if necessary.
Finally, the richness of communications steadily increased to the point that a given communication began to represent more than a simple reflection of thoughts or values held outside the domain. The communication, in transit or stored, began to be valuable in its own right, often as a unique representation of thoughts, wealth, and treasure. Financial transfers, cash accounts, corporate secrets, and pictures are now all stored, often with no backup in the physical world, in cyberspace. Gone are the days when colored rectangles of paper, printed stock certificates, and passbooks served as the primary means to represent financial assets (it is likely that the term passbook, in wide use throughout the 1970s, is completely unknown to those born thereafter). Passbooks have been replaced by ones and zeros that are stored, traded, earned, and lost in cyberspace alone.
The Control Logic Layer
The control logic layer represents the logic embedded in the billions of devices, computers, and other smart components comprising the physical infrastructure of cyberspace. While the spread and ubiquitous presence of this logic make it impossible to literally observe a physical manifestation of this layer, its effect is no less real and is, more importantly, essential to an understanding of the behaviors of cyberspace's fundamental properties. Indeed, the extraordinary efficiency of cyberspace in routing, storing, correlating, and rerouting increasingly massive and complex flows of information is almost wholly dependent on the delegation of these tasks to the logic embedded in this layer.
This is the layer that makes it possible for computers to interact with one another without human interaction as they make the myriad choices needed to sustain coherent and orderly interactions among billions of human and machine users interconnected through cyberspace. The result gives rise to what is increasingly referred to as the Internet of Things, or IoT: Machines interacting with other machines, all programmed to anticipate and exceed the expectations of people who have little direct involvement with, or even understanding of, the technological complexities involved.
The Device Layer
The device layer completes the model. This is perhaps the most visible component of cyberspace, since devices connect users to the services available within and from cyberspace. They include personal computing devices, smartphones, desktops, tablets, and navigation units—an ever increasing and diverse mix of hardware, software, and ubiquitous apps. Their role is to capture, present, and manipulate information according to the user's preferences and the designer's specifications. Importantly, the latter of these two influences is not always evident, as these devices capture