[SIGCIS-Members] cyber jedis

Jon Lindsay jonrlindsay at gmail.com
Wed Apr 18 11:01:18 PDT 2012


Someone is going to be able to write an interesting little article on the
usage evolution of this word "cyber". It is indeed enjoying a renaissance,
I think largely owing to excitement in government security circles (and
the largess which inevitably follows). Some combination of growing
technical possibility for citizen and criminal expression (i.e., Estonia
DDoS and Conficker, respectively), military exhaustion with human-centric
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (i.e., let's get back to technical operations
where we have an advantage), and the rise of China (endemic corporate
espionage) has fostered a propensity to attach "cyber" to just about any
activity. Fear mongering and wildly exaggerated metrics and interpretations
follow.  In several cases of ongoing normalization, the space or hyphen
goes away altogether: cyberspace, cybersecurity, cyberwar. We're not quite
there yet with cyber weapons, cyber deterrence, cyber dominance, or cyber
protest.

Different people seem to use cyber-X to mean very different things: either
cyber-X is even scarier and more potent than regular X (cyber weapons as a
new nuclear age), or cyber-X is ephemeral, virtual, and less tangible than
regular-X (cyber weapons "merely" non-lethal supplements to war). However
it's used, "cyber" has almost always been a bound morpheme used to modify
X, but even that has now changed. Military writers now routinely use
"cyber" as a stand alone word-- "We have to figure out how we are going to
operate in cyber, and how we should train for cyber..."--as a formal
"domain" like air, land, sea, and space. So now we have all these
conversations and conferences dedicated to trying to figure out what
"cyber" really is, whether its a logical dependence on IP, the physical
electromagnetic environment, any sort of IT, etc. Now some people even want
to make a new distinction with a past participle of this already tortured
construction: "Cybered conflict" is somehow different than "cyber conflict"
in cyberspace, and just uses IT, or something. I really hope "cybered"
doesn't stick.

Personally, this notion of an autonomous cyber domain still strikes me as
rather absurd in any metaphysical sense. Insofar as "cyber" from
"cybernetics" means something like "control," then there is absolutely no
action in air, land, sea, or space without the ability to command and
control forces there. But bureaucratically it makes a great deal of sense
for defining fiefdoms and lanes in the road and such. In any case, this
bizarre noun "cyber" is probably here to stay now, at least in US military
discourse.

Have a jolly cyber day!
Jon


On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 9:17 AM, Taylor-Smith, Ella <
E.Taylor-Smith at napier.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi
> This is perhaps a little present-tense for this list, but I the guardian
> is running an interesting series of articles:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/series/battle-for-the-internet
>
> In particular, I thought that you'd be interested in the term "cyber jedi"
> -seemingly used withou comment in this article:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/16/militarisation-of-cyberspace-power-struggle
>
> (It seems to me that the term cyberspace was out of fashion after the turn
> of the century and has recently become current again -just an impression
> though)
>
> -Ella
>
> Ella Taylor-Smith
>
> Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation
> Edinburgh Napier University
> 10 Colinton Road
> Edinburgh, EH10 5DT
>
> Telephone: +44 (0) 131 455 2392
> Email: e.taylor-smith at napier.ac.uk
>
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