From Real Life Magazine, December 16:
Fog Machines
Digital connectivity has turned the “social factory” into a global battlefield
The increasing interconnection of the world is being weaponized. Much of our civilian digital infrastructure, from the internet to GPS, was initially developed for the purposes of fighting and winning wars. This makes the history our digital technology inseparable from the development of weaponry.
We are now seeing a new stage in this development, with the militarization and weaponization of communication technology that had for a brief period become ostensibly civilian. Originally, apparently online phenomena like social media may have seemed innocuous enough, but they are now being reintegrated into a global battlespace as part of a growing “cyberwar.”
Perhaps like all things “cyber-,” the term cyberwar may already feel a bit dated, or as though it fails to capture the complex geopolitics at stake. For example, political scientist Thomas Rid, in Cyberwar Will Not Take Place, argues that “cyberwar” is not a useful concept: what the term names as new is better understood as a continuation of older forms of military intervention — such as information warfare, propaganda, and sabotage — or as an extension of politics. But as outmoded as the term may sound now, it is important to have some way of describing the novelty of interconnected and targeted attacks on and through digital communication systems. Moreover, militaries are using this terminology and directly investing in capacity for the type of attacks it denotes. As this Stratfor article explains, the U.S. is rapidly shifting from defensive to offensive “cyber” capabilities, collecting unknown vulnerabilities (commonly known as zero-day vulnerabilities) and using them to carry out attacks.
Cyberwar takes the form of precisely targeted psychological warfare,
creating an increasingly paranoid enclosure
Before 2016, discussions around “cyberwar” largely focused on how digital attacks could inflict physical damage to infrastructure: They could, for example, disrupt the electricity power grid and aviation, or interfere with military command and control. When attackers targeted cultural and information systems, they were typically presumed to be focused on taking them offline rather than turning them directly into weapons themselves. Stuxnet, a virus likely built by the U.S. and Israel (as detailed in this article in the New York Times), typified this type of attack: The virus, spread by flash drives, infected the industrial control system that ran Iran’s centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Then, while playing fake data to make everything look okay, the virus spun the centrifuges out of control, permanently damaging a substantial number of them.....MUCH MORE
This view of cyberwar changed with the 2016 U.S. election. It is evident that Russia, building on its earlier efforts in Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine, carried out an influence campaign to foment social divisions and aid Donald Trump’s presidential bid. This presents a different conception of cyberwar, using information and communication systems not to attack physical systems but other information systems, such as elections and the media.
But cyberwar cannot be understood as an exclusively technical or even military problem. Digital attacks can also be targeted and delivered more easily by a wider variety of actors, causing more destabilization as they are increasingly used. According to Nick Dyer-Witheford and Svitlana Matviyenko, the authors of the recent Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism, “access to the ‘datified subject’ ” — that is to say, individuals or groups understood as a data archives, available for searching and sorting — “both expands the scope of such operations across planet-spanning networks and intensifies the precision with which they can be targeted.” For the authors, cyberwar is an extension of how world markets, in their ceaseless pursuit of value, have seized upon the individual, targeting them in increasingly disorienting ways. The internet, they declare, is not broken, as nostalgic commentators sometimes suggest; rather “the internet is finally what it was always meant to be. Maybe it is perfect, but not for us, the excommunicated user-subjects. For cyberwar.”...
