Cyberwar: It’s Here, It’s Near, and We’ve Already Gotten Used to It
To live in and through cyberspace is to have already been conscripted
Perpetration vs. Preparation
From Grace Wyler, “Britain’s New Hacker Army Could Change the Face of Cyber War”:
…as the McAfee report points out, the cyber cold war is already underway, and it will only escalate as more nations develop cyber capabilities. While Britain’s announcement may make online threats more likely in the short term, it will also provide the first test of whether offensive cyber capabilities can serve as a deterrent measure against future attacks. And if other countries follow Britain’s lead, it will bring cyber security policy out into the open, aligning public debate with the realities of modern war.
From Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., “‘Cyberwar’ is Over Hyped: It Ain’t War Til Someone Dies”:
Healey doesn’t think much of some of the ethical and strategic choices the US has made, either. “I’m so against things like Stuxnet [and] how aggressive the NSA has been,” he said at Brookings. “We’ve got glass infrastructure and we shouldn’t be throwing stones.” Indeed, Healey argued that the military has grown too dominant in cybersecurity policy, which has been “militarized” in large part because of over-hyped fears of cyberwar.
For several years now we have been hearing whispers of a coming “cyberwar,” and it appears that Britain has moved from whispers to shouting, having recently announced the formation of a UK Cyber Command. Certainly they are not the first to form such a unit, but as Wyler points out, there is something about the brazenness of their announcement that makes the UK’s actions seemingly different from those of the US, China, and other cyber-armed countries.
Yet, as Freedberg Jr. puts it pithily, we are likely overly hasty in our proclamations, as “it ain’t war til someone dies,” and there certainly appears to be a big difference between what military software can do and what military hardware can do.
How then should we view this situation, as one of bellicose escalation or as one of empty posturing?
Perhaps William James can be of use here. As James points out in his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War”,
It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the “peace”-interval.
Should we then think, contrary to those who see cyber “war” as a misnomer, that in fact the “preparation” is the cyberwar? In other words, war and violence should not be thought of as defined and delimited by body counts as Thomas Rid and Steven Pinker would suggest, for the atmosphere surrounding warfare can itself be violent, as James is here suggesting, and as Frantz Fanon argued in his The Wretched of the Earth:
…let us return to this atmospheric violence, this violence rippling under the skin. We have seen as it develops how a number of driving mechanisms pick it up and convey it to an outlet. In spite of the metamorphosis imposed on it by the colonial regime in tribal or regional conflicts, violence continues to progress, the colonized subject puts a name to all of his misfortunes, and casts all his exacerbated hatred and rage in this new direction.
Cyber Colonialism
What Fanon is here describing is the counter-violence of the colonized against their colonial oppressors, a violence that first exists nowhere before it exists everywhere, a violence that is first imagined before it is inflicted. The possibility of violence alone can have violent effects, for the anticipation of a body blow is often enough to make us tense up and recoil as if we had already been hit.
Yet if Fanon is referring to colonialism, to the war between the French colonizers and the Algerian colonized, then how can this apply to cyberwar? Though it may seem like an absurd stretch, perhaps it is possible to see our situation today in terms of colonialism as well, that is, in terms of what might be called “cyber colonialism.”
Cyberspace, first appearing as an assistant, as a way for us to achieve the tasks we already pursue, but to achieve them faster, more efficiently, and without having to leave the house, has come to have such a dominant role in our everyday lives that it is now beginning to appear as if it is we who are the assistant of cyberspace. My iPhone is no longer merely a device I use when I want to check my e-mail on the go or to play Scrabble when I can’t find a board. My iPhone—it feels even a stretch to call it mine, as if the hierarchy of our relationship gives me the dominant position—calls to me, demanding that I interact with the world through it, with it, and, at times, for it (just think of how many operations you perform on your iPhone simply because it “asks” you to).
Just as there is no longer a part of my life on which the iPhone cannot have an effect, there is no longer a space that is not cyber. The Patriot Act has led to a situation where we wait in line at airports to get felt up by strangers in public, but as our physical space has come to have less importance for us than our cyberspace, it is only when TSA or a flight attendant asks us to turn off our iPhones that we begin to get suspicious that such invasive actions are unnecessary and unwarranted.
Living in and through cyberspace as we do, what does it mean for governments around the world to declare their intentions to militarize cyberspace? Following the revelations of Edward Snowden people everywhere came to fear not only the NSA, but to fear cyberspace itself. Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Google, Amazon, nowhere did we feel safe, and everywhere we felt prying eyes and prying iPhones. Suddenly we knew how Tony Soprano felt just before the screen went black. And, just like Tony Soprano, though we know we shouldn’t put ourselves at risk, we also know we just can’t stay off the grid.
In Cyberspace We Are All Tony Soprano
It is precisely this realization, this inabilty to opt for safety in the face of certain danger, a certain danger that we are ourselves in part responsible for, that shows us how Tony Soprano can help us to better understand our current situation. Tony enjoyed the life of a mafia don, the life of being able to have whatever he wanted and do whatever he wanted, but this pleasure-seeking came at the expense of his personal relationships and of his personal security. The end result of this life, this life that he felt he could not and did not want to escape from, was constantly looking over his shoulder for his time to come.
Today we do not need to grow up in a New Jersey mafia family to be able to find ourselves confronted by the existential tension between instant gratification and the constant fear and disconnection that comes with it. Indeed we likely experience such tension most days before we even finish breakfast, as cyberspace allows us to visit countless Badda Bing’s without having to ever leave the house. Though the medium through which we seek pleasure is different than that of Tony Soprano, the dangers are nevertheless very much the same, as we become evermore disconnected from friends and family and evermore vulnerable to cybercrime and surveillance. And like Tony Soprano we know the dangers that surround our behavior, but we also know—or at least think we know—the horrible boredom that comes from a life of “playing it safe.”
It is for this reason that our awareness of the existence of cybercriminals and cyberspies does not manifest itself in our moving away from cyberspace, as instead we each day become more and more dependent on cyberspace. Yet vitally this dependence is not something we chose, for, again like Tony Soprano, it is not that we do not care about the dangers confronting us, but rather that we see no way out.
We know that we shouldn’t activate the iPhone’s location services and tell Apple (and who knows who else) where we are, but we can no longer navigate the world without Siri and Google Maps. We know that we shouldn’t put personal information on Facebook, but we can no longer keep our friends and family up-to-date on our lives without Status Updates. We know that we shouldn’t use our credit card numbers to buy the items in our e-shopping carts, but we can no longer stomach walking around a shopping mall like an animal.
Our schismatic relationship with cyberspace has created a state of existential anxiety wherein our cyberurges are the cyberweapons of each of our own personal cyberwars.
Cyberwar is real and it is already here. We do not need to wait for the United States to declare cyberwar on China, or for Iran to cyberattack the UK, as we each day are engaged in personal cyberwars of our own making. It is thus not the NSA’s surveillance that we have to fear and to regulate, but what it is about ourselves that makes us so desperate to give the NSA so much to surveill.
We have each laid cybersiege to ourselves, so the real question is which side of us will ultimately win: the side that knows that there’s safety in retreating, or the side that fears that we’ll have no life without retweeting?
