Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL HYPERCONNECTIVITY through computer networks has occasioned much marvel, reflection, and commentary on its implications for everything from “just-in-time” supply chain management to the Internet of Things. These developments are also consequential in national security and intelligence. What must objectively be seen as technological progress has also sparked debates that would have been unimaginable half a century ago, and in fields far beyond computer and political sciences. The desire to protect informational assets from theft, subversion, and degradation and questions about how to exploit networked computing for strategic gain have spurred remarkable developments in intelligence collection, policy, doctrine, law, strategy, and even ethical norms. There are active debates about how cyber considerations affect each field touched by them, and it seems that there remain more unsettled than settled questions about cyber power as a lever of statecraft in the twenty-first century. Along the way, multiple claims have been made for the transformational impact of “cyber” and its peculiar challenges as to how practitioners approach traditional conceptions of security and the consequent effects on national power and international order. Many perceive radical transformations stemming from an “information revolution,” sometimes leading to alarmism, hyperbole, and demands for new forms of security politics and practice. Such concerns often find their expression as cyber versions of momentous twentieth-century events, such as the possibility of a “cyber Pearl Harbor” or a “cyber Cuban Missile Crisis.” Others prefer not to throw out the historical baby with the technological bathwater and seek to apply traditional analytical frameworks to contemporary problems of cyber security and insecurity.
Source: Political Science Quarterly
DOI: 10.1002/polq.13031
Authors: David V. Gioe, Michael S. Goodman, Tim Stevens
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3035858724