Suchergebnisse

This is an article about how cybersecurity gets "made," with a focus on the role of commercial computer security firms in generating knowledge in matters of international cybersecurity. The argument is two-fold. Firstly, malware may be an intangible artefact in some ways, but its success and its interpretation as malware is deeply interwoven in social, technical and material alliances. Secondly, a materialist-minded examination of Symantec's Stuxnet reports will demonstrate the politically situated nature of how cybersecurity expertise emerges. The article finds that Symantec's work was not a-political or neutrally-technical: Their experts made profoundly political choices in their analyses. By showing the processes that go into making cybersecurity, the article contributes to a widening and deepening of debates about what is at stake in cybersecurity knowledge and practices.

This study reviews the Department of Defense's (DoD's) biosurveillance-related programs, prioritizes missions and desired outcomes, evaluates how DoD programs contribute to these, and assesses the appropriateness of the funding system for biosurveillance.

Abstract
In contrast to a view of secrecy as a tool of statecraft, where the game of 'covering/uncovering' dominates as the central way of interpreting secrecy's power, we set out 'secrecy games' as an approach for understanding secrecy's power and influence. To do so, we offer a set of three games to illustrate the more varied ways that secrecy operates and draw attention to the ways in which non-state actors use secrecy and shape its effects. In particular, we offer an analysis of: (1) the secrecy games of tunnelling in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the role of mobility as part of secrecy; (2) the secrecy game of camouflage and how stowaways blend in to facilitate access to global shipping routes; and (3) the secrecy game of maze-running and maze-making within urban warfare. Drawing these together, we show how secrecy involves a wider set of actors, practices, and associated knowledge-(un)making strategies than currently understood within International Relations. In turn, this expanded understanding of secrecy helps to make sense of the more complex ways in which secrecy is presented, used, resisted, and transformed – including and especially as a force that limits sovereign power – and, therefore, as central to what shapes global politics.

Cybersecurity has attracted significant political, social, and technological attention as contemporary societies have become increasingly reliant on computation. Today, at least within the Global North, there is an ever-pressing and omnipresent threat of the next "cyber-attack" or the emergence of a new vulnerability in highly interconnected supply chains. However, such discursive positioning of threat and its resolution has typically reinforced, and perpetuated, dominant power structures and forms of violence as well as universalist protocols of protection. In this collective discussion, in contrast, six scholars from different disciplines discuss what it means to "do" "critical" research into what many of us uncomfortably refer to as "cybersecurity." In a series of provocations and reflections, we argue that, as much as cybersecurity may be a dominant discursive mode with associated funding and institutional "benefits," it is crucial to look outward, in conversation with other moves to consider our technological moment. That is, we question who and what cybersecurity is for, how to engage as academics, and what it could mean to undo cybersecurity in ways that can reassess and challenge power structures in the twenty-first century.