William Gibson’s transition from the bridge cycle and Johnny Mnemonic with its meta verse-cyberspace to Blue Ant cycle with it’s careful amplification of trends through nudges etc captures this beautifully
I am one of those people who find this problem so pressing that I have
side-lined my SIEM engineering job to pursue an international
relations degree. It has been an epiphany to say the least.
- The lack of empiricism in cyber policy has transformed it
into a credibility problem, centred around personalities. This problem
is not going away anytime soon.
- If it is going to remain a subjective discipline, then
there are techniques like Process Tracing – well known in public
policy which also struggles with empiricism and emergent properties –
that could be applied than invoking the spirit of John Nash (RIP).
- The offence-defence discourse is soul-suckingly banal. It
boggles me that we choose to completely ignore disciplines like
political economy[1] as they are not as hot as cyber offence.
- I am not sure what Dave meant by COGINT but we need to
start looking at cyber policy papers and policies that have aged
well.[2] It may bring the doctrinal focus back on things like
information operations or lead to a Socratic first-principles
assessment.[3]
- Look, I understand that exploit writers and hackers feel
like Oppenheimer when he paraphrased the Sanskrit quote: “Now I am
become death, the destroyer of worlds”. But the technologist,
liberalist and realist sides need to know that their perspectives do
not apply in absolute terms in cyber policy.[4] Weird machines and
national power are reflexive.
- One thing is for sure: cyber policy has slipped out of the
hands of norm entrepreneurs. We really need to stop talking about
norms, normative frameworks and Tallinn Manual for a while now.
Best,
Pukhraj
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[1] Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski, The Real Cyber War: The
Political Economy of Internet Freedom (University of Illinois Press,
2015).
[2] Erik Gartzske, ‘The Myth of Cyberwar: Bringing War in Cyberspace
Back Down to Earth’, International Security 38, no. 2 (2013): 41–73;
Michael Monte, Network Attacks and Exploitation: A Framework (Wiley,
2015).
[3] David Ormrod and Benjamin Turnbull, ‘The Cyber Conceptual
Framework for Developing Military Doctrine’, Defence Studies 16, no. 3
(2016): 277–80.
[4] Jon R. Lindsay and Derek S. Reveron, ‘Conclusion’, in China and
Cybersecurity: Espionage, Strategy, and Politics in the Digital Domain
(Oxford Scholarship Online, 2015), 334–52.
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