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The Spoked Wheel’s CyberwarfareQ&A
cyberwarfare,politics,technology 
Questions by Artur Matos Alves, ResearcherAnswers by Armando Marques Guedes, Professor, Faculdade de Direito, Universidade Nova de Lisboa(Lisbon) and author of several books on international relations, political science and defence (mainlyin Portuguese; you can find a few of them here).
 This Q&A aims to question the current state of cyberwarfareininternational relations and its impact both in military doctrineand the way we perceive information and communicationtechnologies – and the political implications of that. Thechallenge was graciously accepted by
Prof. ArmandoMarques Guedes
, coming to life in a series of questions andanswers rather longer than the typical blog post. Of course,the discussion easily branches out to social networks,collaboration and surveillance, and some of the trends of contemporary politics. The text has been updated several times, enriched with newinsights and intel.
What would be your over-arching definition of cyberwarfare?
I am not sure defining what in fact is a fast moving targetwould be too prudent. One may, however, easily circumscribethe notion of cyberwarfare, so that we all know what we aretalking about, or at least what we are referring to. There seemto be two possible approaches to such a circumscription, one‘tighter’ and another, a looser, more inclusive, one.Let me begin with the tighter approach, the one that isolatesa more limitative cluster. That would go something like this:cyberwarfare alludes to those aspects of conduct in war inwhich digital media are
both
instruments and targets. This, of course, is a very restrictive circumscription, you will note, as itexcludes, for instance, things such as ‘conventional’ (in the
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sense of non-digital) attacks on digital equipments orinfrastructures, or the use of, say, computers, for attacks on‘conventional’ targets. For the sake of clarity in object-definition, even if this means designing a rather reductioniststraitjacket, I would normally prefer to reserve the termcyberwarfare to those actions and activities in which digitalparaphernalia are present, simultaneously, as targets
and 
asresources – even if and when the final aims of this type of warfare stand well outside such domains, as does perhapshappen in the large majority of cases.A looser, more inclusive circumscription, which I would tend tofavor as a mere means of allusion, includes all strikes thatinvolve digital media,
either 
as subjects
or 
as objects. Thislooser use tags a far more evanescent cluster of activities andactions, of course.All in all, I prefer the tighter, earlier usage, as it neatly allowsus to know precisely what it is we are conversing about.However, since the boundaries between digitally produced‘reality’ and analogical one are shifting quickly andunpredictably, I think it is sensible to also retain the mode of circumscription that I called the looser one – even if only as ageneral indicative term of allusion: it offers us useful semanticslack, which minimizes the risk that we may soon have toforego the term ‘cyberwarfare’ altogether as well as the risk of reifying it. ‘Cyberwarfare’ is far more than a mere instrumentalthing, comparable to, say, ‘gun warfare’, or ‘tank warfare’; it iscloser to things like ‘psychwarfare’, or even ‘armed combat’.But all in all I tend to prefer steering clear of definitions, forwhich I see fewer benefits than disadvantages.
Companies in all areas now rely heavily on ICT, not tomention states and other organizations. This has leadto a deep perception of the dangers of pervasivenetworks. What countries and/or organizations do yousee as being in the forefront of cyber securityandcyberwarfare? Can we even point out the main threatsat this time, given all the speculation about Russia,China, North Korea?
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I would certainly place those three at the top of my list. But Iwould also include non-State entities here, both in whatconcerns cyber attacks and cyber security. Entities like al-Qaeda may try for that (they did try to go for bioterrorism) asmight Hamas (a few of them died, not that long ago, whentheir bio weapon – the bubonic plague, it is believed –accidentally killed them). For cyber security, I would bet on theUS, Germany, the UK, Japan, Brazil, Russia, China, andanonymous hacker geeks wikiing their way upwards on opensource software development.
 
In your new book about the 2008Russia invasion of   Georgia, – a work published by the Portuguese Ministryof Defense’s Institute for Higher Military Studies (IESM)– you mention that the action was «hybrid», not in thepurely “combined arms” sense, which would nowinclude cyberwarfare (would it not?) but mainly to pointout the role of civilian participation. Can this beinterpreted as an emerging doctrine or a contextualway to leverage cyber-anarchists or sympathizers?Maybe this cn be formulated in another way: can civilsociety make itself an instrument of cyberpolitics? Anddo you see this as an inevitable outcome of the growingvirtualization of life, social relations and “hollowstates” (as John Robbputs it)?
To my mind, it is both of the above. Cyberwarfare makes useof spontaneous civil society
compagnons de route
, while it stillhas a way to go to become a fully-fledged doctrine in anymeaningful sense. It is probably nevertheless safe to stressthat a doctrine is indeed crystallizing around a pattern of force-mobilization that we would be hard put to not recognize asgrowing very fast indeed, and this the world over. The“hybridity” I wrote about will most certainly be there for aslong as open access connectedness remains, empowering non-State actors all the way down to individuals – and perhapsbeyond, to fashions, moods and states of mind.It is not difficult to see how and why this is so. Technology, forquite a long time, tended to favour the consolidation of political hierarchies. Modern technology, instead, largelybecause of its low cost and very low cost-steepness, appears
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uploaded a new revision for this document (#6)

12 / 05 / 2009
amarquesguedes

could we perhaps have comments on this interview?

reply09 / 30 / 2009
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