tandfonline | In
1993, before WiFi, indeed before more than a small fraction of people
enjoyed broadband Internet, John J. Arquilla and David F. Ronfeldt of
the Rand Corporation began to develop a thesis on “Cyberwar and Netwar”
(Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1995).
I found it of little interest at the time. It seemed typical of Rand’s
role as a sometime management consultant to the military-industrial
complex. For example, Arquilla and Ronfeldt wrote that “[c]yberwar
refers to conducting military operations according to
information-related principles. It means disrupting or destroying
information and communications systems. It means trying to know
everything about an adversary while keeping the adversary from knowing
much about oneself.” A sort of Sun Tzu for the networked era.
The
authors’ coining of the notion of “netwar” as distinct from “cyberwar”
was even more explicitly grandiose. They went beyond bromides about
inter-military conflict, describing impacts on citizenries at large:
Netwar refers to information-related conflict at a grand level between nations or societies. It means trying to disrupt or damage what a target population knows or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it. A netwar may focus on public or elite opinion, or both. It may involve diplomacy, propaganda and psychological campaigns, political and cultural subversion, deception of or interference with local media, infiltration of computer networks and databases, and efforts to promote dissident or opposition movements across computer networks. (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1995)While “netwar” never caught on as a name, I was, in retrospect, too quick to dismiss it. Today it is hard to look at Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s crisp paragraph of more than 20 years ago without appreciating its deep prescience.
Our
digital environment, once marked by the absence of sustained state
involvement and exploitation, particularly through militaries, is now
suffused with it. We will need new strategies to cope with this kind of
intrusion, not only in its most obvious manifestations – such as
shutting down connectivity or compromising private email – but also in
its more subtle ones, such as subverting social media for propaganda
purposes.
Many
of us thinking about the Internet in the late 1990s concerned ourselves
with how the network’s unusually open and generative architecture
empowered individuals in ways that caught traditional states – and, to
the extent they concerned themselves with it at all, their militaries –
flat-footed. As befitted a technology that initially grew through the
work and participation of hobbyists, amateurs, and loosely confederated
computer science researchers, and later through commercial development,
the Internet’s features and limits were defined without much reference
to what might advantage or disadvantage the interests of a particular
government.
To
be sure, conflicts brewed over such things as the unauthorized
distribution of copyrighted material, presaging counter-reactions by
incumbents. Scholars such as Harvard Law School professor Lawrence
Lessig (2006)
mapped out how the code that enabled freedom (to some; anarchy to
others) could readily be reworked, under pressure of regulators if
necessary, to curtail it. Moreover, the interests of the burgeoning
commercial marketplace and the regulators could neatly intersect: The
technologies capable of knowing someone well enough to anticipate the
desire for a quick dinner, and to find the nearest pizza parlor, could –
and have – become the technologies of state surveillance.
That
is why divisions among those who study the digital environment –
between so-called techno-utopians and cyber-skeptics – are not so vast.
The fact was, and is, that our information technologies enable some
freedoms and diminish others, and more important, are so protean as to
be able to rearrange or even invert those affordances remarkably
quickly.
