INTS207
This week in INT207, we focused on cybersecurity. We looked at both internal and external threats, and the emergence of ‘Homo Digitalis.’
As Snowden exposed in 2013, the US government, as well as other governments around the world, have extremely extensive civilian surveillance programs. As the NSA has stated, these security measures are imposed to protect citizens from terror and crime, and are present within phone calls, text messages, social media and mobile phones. The NSA collects information from 6 billion phone calls a month. Per month, Brazil collects 2.3 billion, India collects 13. 5 billion and Germany collects 500 million phone calls. The amount of private information being collected every day is almost incomprehensible, with Greenwald stating that an estimated 20 trillion communications have been recorded since 9/11.
This sort of cyber security can have privacy consequences as this immense amount of information could be used for good or bad. The importance and effects of cybersecurity have been widely debated among IR theorists, such as realists and Marxists. As citizens, are we only deserving of protection if we give up some of our rights? The majority agrees that cyber security has gone too far.
External threats are also an issue within cyber security. This type of threat is mostly used in the form of hacking, cyber terrorism and fake news. The goal of hacking, also known as ‘hacktivism’, is usually to promote disobedience, disrupt normality and intimidate the general public. Additionally, cyber terrorism is used to spread fear and to achieve a political goal and fake news is a powerful way to spread misinformation in order to create a false balance. Cyber threats are a popular way to pose danger to a state as these incidences are extremely hard to trace back. An example of this can be seen through the attack of the Australian parliament house. It lost important information to whoever attacked it. Although it was assumed to be China, there is no way to prove it. The term ‘cyber arms race’ is used to describe the sharp increase of cybersecurity measures to help defend each state. Reardon and Choucri (2012) write: ‘realist theories of deterrence, crisis management, and conflict may be used to understand whether cyberspace is stabilizing or destabilizing, whether cyber technologies will be a new source of conflict or of peace, and whether states will engage in cyber arms racing.’
A phenomenon that has occurred from all this is ‘Homo Digitalis.’ It has been described as a “new type of hyper empowered individuals, networked, globally connected and more potent than ever before” by Patrikarakos. Three trends have been identified within this notion:
- power has shifted from hierarchies and institutions to individual citizens and networks of citizens
- the narrative dimension arguably more important than he physical dimension of warfare
- modern conflicts tend to take place between a state and non state actors or be a grey area of conflict
As Richard W. Mansbach and Kirsten L. Tayler stated in the textbook, “the spread of irregular conflict has challenged armies that were designed to fight conventional interstate conflicts.” An example of this phenomenon can be found in Farah Baker, a teenage girl from Gaza who went viral after she begun posting about her experience of war. This helped change the narrative and encouraged the world to shift against Israel.
GEMMA 