Abstract
No frontier lasts forever, and no global commons extends endlessly. Today we are witnessing the fence building process of the cyberspace. The days of limited cyber spying through software backdoors or betrayals by trusted insiders, vandalism, or even theft had evolved into the ability to deliver devastating blows from afar. Thus, states are establishing sovereign control in the virtual world in the name of security and economic sustainability. This paper analyses the emergence of what we call cybered territorial sovereignty as a consequence of states’ efforts to secure their borders against cyber attacks. The case of Stuxnet is introduced as an instance of new threat faced in the cyberspace. We argue Stuxnet marks the beginning of a new cyber Westphalian world of virtual borders and national cyber commands. We have seen this phenomena before as states consolidated their position following the treaties of Onasbrucke and Munster. Existing theories about the emergence of international rules and institutions can help us understand how the Westphalian model will adapt to the demands of securing cyberspace.
This chapter is an updated and revised version of Chris C. Demchak and Peter Dombrowski. 2011. “Rise of a Cybered Westphalian Age”. Strategic Studies Quarterly. 5(1), 31–62.
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Notes
- 1.
Cybered conflict differs from cyber war or cyber battle. The latter is fully technological and could, in principle, be conducted entirely within a network. It is normally a component of the former. A cybered conflict is any conflict of national significance in which key events determining the path to the generally accepted outcome of the conflict could not have proceeded unless cyber means were non-substitutable and critically involved. The terms are distinctively and deliberately used in this article.
- 2.
Threats are considered so serious that cyber-security officials are now expected to have training in known hacker methods (Gertz 2010).
- 3.
This effect, according to John Mallery (2010), is a national cyber security means of increasing the “work factors”—conceptualized as computational complexity, cost, cognitive difficulty, risk and uncertainty, cultural factors, and information differentials—for bad actors.
- 4.
Three of the world’s largest sites are banding together with two of the largest content distribution networks, Akamai and Limelight, coordinated by the internet Society, to declare 8 June 2011 World IPv6 (internet Protocol version 6) Day.
- 5.
US laws enable “authorities” to draw legislative lines between offense (a military “Title 10” authority), defense (of military, “Title 18”; or of the wider government, a DHS mission), and the collection of national intelligence (a “Title 50” mission given the National Security Agency as primus inter pares electronic collector among other intelligence agencies).
- 6.
- 7.
See the website http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/site_rubrique97.html, hosted by ANSSI, which rather openly discusses its successes in strengthening cyber defenses.
- 8.
Private conversation with senior civilian cyber-security police official in Germany, October 2010.
- 9.
Even the Chinese government has felt the need to have a cyber command equivalent and publicly announced its creation of a cyber warfare unit as a defensive measure in response to the provocative actions of the US government in creating a cyber command (Branigan 2010).
- 10.
For more explanation of cybered conflicts see unpublished manuscript, currently under editorial review, Peter Dombrowski and Chris Demchak, “Cyber war, Cybered Conflict and the Maritime Domain.”
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Demchak, C.C., Dombrowski, P.J. (2014). Rise of a Cybered Westphalian Age: The Coming Decades. In: Mayer, M., Carpes, M., Knoblich, R. (eds) The Global Politics of Science and Technology - Vol. 1. Global Power Shift. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55007-2_5
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