Cyber War Will Not Take Place by Rid Thomas

Author:Rid, Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

SUBVERSION

The previous chapters discussed two general types of cyber attack, namely sabotage and espionage. The third remaining offensive activity is subversion. Subversion was one of the most complex and intellectually challenging political phenomena long before the arrival of modern telecommunication. But the Internet and the commoditization of telecommunication are changing the nature of subversion, making it even more complex. As a consequence, this chapter, more than the two previous chapters, is only able to scratch the surface of a much deeper subject. Remarkably, that subject has received comparatively little recent scholarly attention. But by focusing on subversion, and not on insurgency or terrorism, the following paragraphs open fresh perspectives on past examples that help to understand the likely lifespan and endurance of resistance movements in a networked present and an even more networked future.

The first dozen years of the twenty-first century have seen an explosion in protest and political violence. The most extreme and cataclysmic expression of this trend was al-Qaeda’s attack on New York’s World Trade Center. One decade later, and only across the street in Zuccotti Park, yet in many ways on the opposite end of the spectrum, rose the Occupy Wall Street movement. The panoply of subversive movements in-between includes Arab youth triggering uprisings against despised despots, the alter-globalization movement, animal rights activists, anonymous hacktivists, and assorted social media-enabled protest movements in Russia, China, Iran, and elsewhere. At first glance these phenomena have little in common: some are seen as a righteous force for progress and overdue change—others as an expression of perfidy, barbarism, and regression.

Yet at second glance these diverse examples have at least two common characteristics to all observers, regardless of their allegiances. The first is that they all share the goal of undermining the authority of an existing order. Activists in any of these examples may not share one vision of what the despised existing order should be replaced by, but they share the belief that the establishment should be forced to change its ways, if not its constitutional setup. Whether extreme or mainstream, whether peaceful or violent, whether legal or criminal, whether progressive or regressive, these movements were all subversive. The second common characteristic is that all these movements or groups benefited to a certain degree from new communication technologies. Taking action seems to have been enabled, at least initially, by the newfound ability to send and receive information, often interactively and often personal, on platforms that were no longer controlled by the very establishment the activists were up against, like their country’s mainstream media, state-run or not. Whether radical or conventional, whether non-violent or militant, whether legitimate or outcast, these movements all had a virtual trait.1 This chapter proceeds from the assumption that new subversive movements in a networked twenty-first-century context merit a general discussion: cyberspace is changing the nature of subversion, both to the benefit and to the chagrin of activists and militants.

Subversion is an old idea that arose in Europe’s own democratic revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.