Militaries can no longer kill their way out of problems in a global information age, and this is driving war into the shadows. Today, plausible deniability is more potent than firepower: winners and losers are no longer decided on the battlefield, but by those who can discern truth from lies. The best weapons today don’t fire bullets.
Terrorism online presented a new twist—never before had the United States been involved in a conflict where the enemy could communicate from overseas directly with the American people. And just months before I arrived at the FBI in 2007, working as a special counsel and later chief of staff to Director Robert Mueller, a new online tool named Twitter launched. We had no idea then how much power it would give to online extremists.
Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 media partners.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/nso-spyware-pegasus-cellphones/
Does the concept of sovereignty apply to cyberspace? Is the maintenance of territorial and conceptual boundaries associated with national sovereignty compatible with an interconnected, independent cyberspace? If not, is the default alternative a reinterpretation of the power and authority of nation-states? Must reconstruction or deconstruction of politically sovereign entities occur in order to conform to the inherently “free” nature of a digital era?
Link to a larger pdf discussing the issue of sovereignty in cyberspace.
The Biden administration faces not only waves of Chinese antisatellite weapons but a history of jumbled responses to the intensifying threat.
“There’s been a dawning realization that our space systems are quite vulnerable,” said Greg Grant, a Pentagon official in the Obama administration who helped devise its response to China. “The Biden administration will see more funding — not less — going into space defense and dealing with these threats.”
The protective goal is to create an American presence in orbit so resilient that, no matter how deadly the attacks, it will function well enough for the military to project power halfway around the globe in terrestrial reprisals and counterattacks. That could deter Beijing’s strikes in the first place. The hard question is how to achieve that kind of strong deterrence.
Three decades ago, the United States spawned, then cornered, the market for hackers, their tradecraft, and their tools. But over the past decade, its lead has been slipping, and those same hacks have come boomeranging back on us…
Over the next three years, Iran emerged from a digital backwater into one of the most prolific cyber armies in the world. China, after a brief pause, is back to pillaging America’s intellectual property. And, we are now unwinding a Russian attack on our software supply chain that compromised the State Department, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Energy and its nuclear labs and the Department of Homeland Security, the very agency charged with keeping Americans safe…
At this very moment, we are getting hacked from so many sides that it has become virtually impossible to keep track, let alone inform the average American reader who is trying to grasp a largely invisible threat that lives in code, written in language that most of us will never fully understand.
An IB Global Politics Site 