Looking forward, it is clear that the challenges the Navy face are shifting in character, are increasingly difficult to address in isolation, and are changing quickly. This will require us to reexamine our approaches in every aspect of our operations.
Whether the threat of sanctions and loss of face will deter actual behavior of the complex organization we summarize as “China” remains to be seen.
“It’s all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, ‘Huh? What?’ You yell shark, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.” In the summer of 1975, the budding auteur, Steven Spielberg, created a virtual panic at America’s beaches with ingeniously crafted screen images of a certain Great White Fish. The top […]
U.S. Congressman Mike Rogers chairs the House of Representatives’ panel on intelligence, which this week overwhelmingly approved a new cyber security bill designed to enhance data sharing between the government and private industry to protect computer networks and intellectual property from cyber attacks. Yet the day before it passed, Rogers had a more novel idea […]
The hacker collective Anonymous this week launched a massive cyber attack against thousands of Israeli webpages–including sites for the Prime Minister’s Office and the Holocaust memorial museum Yad Vashem. Despite the efforts of hackers around the world to deface Israeli websites and the social media accounts of the country’s citizens, the cyber onslaught was largely […]
I appeared on the talk show “The Fresh Outlook” this weekend to discuss cybersecurity issues and China. Here is a link to the video. I argued for a more nuanced, less panicky approach when dealing with China on this sensitive subject. Here are some more thoughts: The most recent revelations of the activities of the Chinese […]
My colleague Dr. Greg Austin and I wrote a short discussion paper titled “Cybersecurity: Crime Prevention or Warfare?” for the 49th Munich Security Conference which took place this February in Munich, Germany. We identified some of the top challenges pertaining to cybersecurity and outlined six policy action ideas. Given the recent revelations about the Chinese […]
Following the failure of his nomination of Susan Rice to head the Defense Department, President Obama has nominated Chuck Hagel, 66, a former Republican senator and Vietnam veteran as the next Secretary of Defense. Hagel was awarded two Purple Hearts for wounds he received serving as an infantry squad leader in Vietnam, then entered the […]
Ronald Deibert is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab and the University of Toronto. He is a cofounder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor. He is author of the Great Decisions 2012 article Cybersecurity: the new frontier. He […]
At risk of tooting the horn for my former employer, IEEE Spectrum magazine, I want to commend my former colleagues and fellow bloggers for sharply raising the question of whether the U.S. government considered the global consequences when it decided to unleash Stuxnet and, most likely, Flame as well. In a Monday post, Robert […]
Me culpa. Yesterday I speculated about the origins of Flame and noted at the outset that Stuxnet generally is attributed to Israel, perhaps with the United States as an accessory. In an exhaustive report published this morning, the New York Times reports that Stuxnet was in fact a U.S. product, part of a cyber-sabotage program […]
One of the ironies of Pax Americana is that it rests upon the nuclear bombing of Japan at the end of the Second World War. Yet this searing and incontrovertible statement of technological superiority, power and the will to use it has not been the final word on global security for some time. Nuclear weapons […]