Suchergebnisse

In Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, John Nixon tells the fascinating story of Saddam Hussein's capture and interrogation. At the same time, writes Joe Devanny, Nixon excoriates the George W. Bush administration's approach to intelligence and policy in the build-up to the Iraq war. This is a short, highly readable book, suffused with controlled anger at the intelligence community's shortcomings, but also offering some striking lessons for would-be intelligence analysts and policymakers, underlining the risks of unchallenged assumptions and the pitfalls of decision-making with imperfect information and political bias.

"This Research Handbook provides a rigorous analysis of cyberwarfare, a widely misunderstood field of contemporary conflict and geopolitical competition. Gathering insights from leading scholars and practitioners, it examines the actors involved in cyberwarfare, their objectives and strategies, and scrutinises the impact of cyberwarfare in a world dependent on connectivity. The Research Handbook on Cyberwarfare interrogates cyberwarfare as a form of military intelligence statecraft that seeks to exploit digital systems for operational and strategic advantage. Chapter authors address cyberwarfare in its conceptual, historical, operational and strategic dimensions, and explore the application of international law, norms, ethics and arms control to this area of conflict. They pose crucial questions about the utility of cyberwarfare and its effects on society and citizens, establishing foundations for future research on the topic as a fact of international life. Providing rich detail in an accessible and understandable manner, this Research Handbook is a vital resource for scholars and researchers of cyber conflict, international relations, and security studies. Its practical elements will also appeal to military and intelligence practitioners, as well as those interested in how cyberwarfare can be regulated to ameliorate its effects on society"--

Many accounts of the Civil Service since 1979 have focused on the significant changes that have occurred in its size, shape and organisational structure. Less attention has been paid to the people who worked in Whitehall throughout this period, what it felt like to be a Civil Servant and how this changed over time. Before 1979 there had only been three women permanent secretaries in the history of the Civil Service, in 1979 there were none. Whitehall gradually became more gender balanced over the next three decades, and in early 2011 half of department-heading permanent secretaries were women. The statistics tell a story about how Whitehall changed in these years, but it is also important to ask how it felt to be a female in Whitehall throughout the period. In this new report, Women and Whitehall: Gender and the Civil Service since 1979, we look at the experience of women officials in Whitehall and the ways in which the Civil Service has become more gender balanced, both overall and grade-by-grade, since 1979. We interviewed 29 current and former senior officials, from those who joined the Civil Service in 1961 to those who joined in the 2000s. This report draws on their reflections and views, illuminating the lived experience of several generations of Whitehall's women. It explores their career paths, the initiatives to address gender and other diversity and explores the idea of a Whitehall 'culture' and whether it presented an obstacle for women (and some men) to overcome. This report forms part of the Contemporary History of Whitehall project, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded collaboration between the Policy Institute at King's College London and the Institute for Government. The project explores the ways in which Whitehall changed between 1979 and 2010, and seeks to make the history of Whitehall relevant to today's policy makers.

In March 2019, Nicolás Maduro claimed that the blackout in Venezuela was caused by U.S. cyber-attacks. This statement was promptly denied by Mike Pompeo, the U.S. Secretary of State. Irrespective of the truth of Maduro's allegation, this episode highlights the diplomatic challenges for states in the contemporary information environment, in which contested narratives proliferate and embed themselves more durably because of the deterritoriality and disintermediation of the Internet. This is particularly true in the context of an emerging pattern of state actors conducting cyber operations against critical infrastructure in other states. The cumulative impact of these different strands is that states will likely struggle to control the perception of their intentions in the cyber domain, not only amongst governments but across the many national audiences that comprise the global public sphere. Focusing on Maduro's allegation, this article analyses the political utility of cyber uncertainty, and its corresponding implications for states' cyber strategies and decisionmaking.