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CHAPTER FIVE CIRCUITS OF POWER: SECURITY IN THE INTERNET ENVIRONMENT RONALD J. DEIBERT In 1995, the United States Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense issued a joint press release noting that “The security of information systems and networks is the major security challenge of this decade and possibly the next century.” Given the pantheon of both old and new security threats—from nuclear weapons to environmental degradation—such a pronouncement was of no minor significance. Indeed , in a very short time the Internet has acquired a rather ominous association, one that invokes images of anonymous hackers and crackers, nebulous transnational criminals and money launderers, cyber-terrorists, pornographers and pedophiles. At the root of this more ominous association is the belief—articulated in an increasingly large volume of popular and academic literatures—that as societies become more dependent on networked information infrastructures, they also become more vulnerable to potential electronic catastrophe, either through accident or malicious intent. These new problems of security in the context of the Internet are the focus of this paper. As many have commented, security is a loaded term that activates a powerful set of interconnected symbols and ideas. To be thrust into the realm of security, an issue takes on the imprimatur of utmost importance; the division between the high politics of military security affairs and the low politics of economics reflects this importance. More specifically, the notion evokes a specific set of responses characterized by what Paul Chilton calls “metaphors of containment”—that is, state surveillance of, and territorial defense from, external or outside forces (1995). A residue of the Westphalian war system—where states have been the primary aggregations of political power with territorial encroachment from other states in the system constituting the primary threat—security has been traditionally conjoined with policies of fortification, balancing, and a hardening of the outer shell of the state (Herz 1957). It is because of these associations, and recent policy initiatives by governments in China, Singapore, Germany, and elsewhere, that many foresee a coming government “clampdown” on the Internet. 115 Yet a quick glance at some of the ways security is being used in conjunction with the Internet reveals a more complex picture. Certainly the steps taken by the Chinese government to build a great “firewall” fall in step with the expectations outlined above, as do attempts by sectors of the U.S. government to limit the spread of enhanced encryption technologies. But out of step with these expectations are ideas concerning networked communications and computer security in areas such as E-commerce or corporate communications. Rather than building walls and clamping down on the Internet, here the emphasis is on devising policies and protocols to further accelerate transnational communication flows. In this sense, security is employed with reference to insuring the validity of purchase transactions, detecting network viruses, and preventing system crashes—measures designed to free up, rather than clamp down on the global information infrastructure. What, then, does security in the context of the Internet mean for the development of global communications? Is the Internet a security threat? If so, to whom or what is it a threat and in what ways? How will the resolution of the Internet- security problematic affect world order? A first cut at answering these questions is suggested by several perspectives falling within the rubric of so-called critical studies of security (Krause and Williams 1996; Lipschutz 1995; Huysmans 1998; Williams 1998). Although diverse, together these studies provide two basic analytical points that make them especially attractive to this study. First, they emphasize the historicity of notions of security—that is, that security is not a notion that is fixed and transparent, but something produced in history and changes over time (Krause and Williams 1996, 49).1 Second, they underscore the constitutive nature of collective images of security (Cox 1986, 218–19).2 Ideas and theories of what constitute a security threat, in other words, promote and reproduce a particular type of world order by privileging a particular set of policy responses , and an object or referent that is to be secured. Assessments of whether some issue or actor is a security threat, in other words, always presuppose an object that requires securing and a type of political order that is valued. Although the latter has traditionally centered on the nation-state, it need not necessarily be so, and can conceivably encompass other actors or objects in the future. While these critical perspectives provide a useful framework to assess the...

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