Constructing the Cyberterrorist

Critical Reflections on the UK Case

Gareth Mott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000755008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book maps and analyses the official British construction of the threat of cyberterrorism.

By using interpretive discourse analysis, this book identifies 'strands' from a corpus of policy documents, statements, and speeches from UK Ministers, MPs, and Peers between 12 May 2010 and 24 June 2016. The book examines how the threat of cyberterrorism was constructed in the UK, and what this securitisation has made possible. The author makes novel contributions to the Copenhagen School's 'securitisation theory' framework by outlining a 'tiered' rather than monolithic audience system; refining the 'temporal' and 'spatial' conditioning of a securitisation with reference to the distinctive characteristics of cyberterrorism; and, lastly, by detailing the way in which popular fiction can be ascribed agency to 'fill in' an absence of 'cyberterrorism' case studies. He also argues that the UK government's classification of cyberterrorism as a 'Tier One' threat created a central strand upon which a discursive securitisation was established.

This book will be of interest to students of Critical Security Studies, terrorism studies, UK politics, and international relations.

1
Interpreting the construction of hypothetical threatening actors in cyberspace

This book is broadly situated within an ‘interpretive’ movement that has developed within international relations and Security Studies. This interpretive movement shares common features with Constructivism and Post-Structuralism, particularly with regard to the operational power of ideas and norms in the shaping of domestic, foreign, and security policy (Bevir, Daddow and Hall, 2013:166). Importantly, these approaches also reject the positivism that underpins traditional approaches to Security Studies, such as Realism and its variants, because it is believed that this positivism “rests on the erroneous philosophical idea that knowledge of the world can come from pure reason or pure experience” (Bevir, Daddow and Hall, 2013:166). Interpretive approaches differ in several substantive ways. For instance, unlike Structural Realism, the interpretive movement does not consider the structures of an a priori international system to impose limits on the actions and behaviours of agents. Instead, agents (for instance, the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, or a police spokesperson) are able to adapt and alter norms directly or indirectly, either through conscious or unconscious action. The actions of agents are not conducted in an isolated vacuum; rather, actions are taken in a cumulative, layered history, where each action could be seen to have been influenced by previous actions before it (Daddow, 2011; Lynch, 2014:2). In order to engage with this model of cumulative actions, interpretivists conceive of ‘traditions’ and ‘dilemmas’. Accordingly, “a tradition captures the historical inheritance against the background of which individuals act. A dilemma captures the way people are capable of modifying this inheritance to incorporate novel experiences or ideas” (Bevir, Daddow and Hall, 2013:167).

The interpretive approach offers a dynamic roadmap through which one might resist an urge for flagrant positivism, which, if treated as an object of faith in Social Science, can support or spur potentially misaligned or even disastrous policy decisions. This approach is particularly pertinent in the context of Critical Terrorism Studies, in which the comprehension of terrorism not as a criminal matter but instead as a concern of politically motivated pseudo-warfare has encouraged a self-fulfilling prophecy where manufactured fear of ‘terrorism’ in British society feeds a demand for such attacks to be carried out, because of the disproportionate reporting and reciprocity that such an attack would receive. To an interpretivist, facts are not established on a neutral, vacuumed playing field in which all vested commentators have dutifully purged themselves of their pre-existing biases, experiences, and knowledge before entering. Even if one ardently sought to purge oneself of pre-existing bias and subjective experience that might interfere with an objective identification, this would be a fruitless endeavour. Knowledge is acquired when human beings interpret new experiences through a continually fluid prism that is unconsciously tempered by what we have already experienced and learned (Hay, 2011:168). To point this out is absolutely not to undermine the facility of human knowledge but rather to emphasise the inherently subjective nature of security politics.

Bevir and Rhodes (2005), whose co-authored publications on British politics and interpretivism have been integral to the formation of the interpretive approach, have sought to justify the linking of the concept of ‘belief’ with the concept of ‘practice’. As Bevir and Rhodes note, whilst we cannot know a priori how people may respond to a specific circumstance, we can make conjectures “that seek to explain practices and actions by pointing to the conditional connections, beliefs, traditions, and dilemmas” (Bevir and Rhodes, 2004; Bevir and Rhodes, 2005:181). In this context, practice is “a move or thrust into an only partly known and knowable world”; in acting, an individual extends their “intentions and understandings into this indeterminate world without being able to predict how its agency will effectuate itself and impact us” (Wagenaar, 2012:92). Beliefs inform an actor of the likely ‘feedback’ that they will receive from a particular practice, allowing for some degree of conjecture towards a desired outcome, and, indeed, that given practice may lead to other agents altering or reinforcing their beliefs.

The interpretivist approach to Social Scientific enquiry is applied here because it offers opportunities that cannot be afforded with more dogmatic schools of thought. Cyberterrorism, at least in the British state’s understanding of the term, has not, at the time of writing, occurred; indeed, ‘kosher’ cyberterrorism can be considered a belief. This is the belief that there are, presently and in the foreseeable future, terrorist groups operating inside or outside of the UK who actively wish to attack British critical national infrastructure with cyber weapons and who may possess the capacity to develop or to acquire such weapons. As Converse noted in the 1960s,

belief systems have never surrendered easily to empirical study…. [I]ndeed, they have often served as primary exhibits for the doctrine that what is important to study cannot be measured and what can be measured is not important to study.

(1964:205)

Applying an interpretive approach allows one to critique how agents engage with their perceptions of cyberterrorism. These perceptions are, to a certain extent, elucidated in the narratives that vested actors provide in public-facing spaces. Such public-facing narratives can be scrutinised through securitisation theory, in order to assess their interplay with security politics in practice.

Narratives, and their interplay, form what we can term ‘discourse’. Discourse refers to the material that human beings say or write about a given issue, and it is the fundamental toolkit that enables human beings to coexist as social beings capable of conveying complex intersubjective knowledge (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001; Phillips and Jorgensen, 2002). As Baker-Beall writes, discourse refers to “systems of thought composed of ideas, beliefs and practices … that structure how we think about a particular subject” (2016:31). Applied in sufficient volume (either absolute or relative), language practices acquire traction and acceptability, potentially to the extent that one could identify a discourse as being hegemonic.

In her defence of discourse analysis as a method of social enquiry, Milliken (1999) stresses some “commitments” that are held by those who utilise this approach. The first of these, she wrote, was to the “concept of discourse as structures of signification which construct social realities” (Milliken, 1999:229). This construction is achieved through the establishment of ‘common sense’ (Ashley and Walker, 1990). In essence, a discourse formation can be said to place limits on the epistemic, subjective, and ethical bases within which a range of statements are possible (McKenna, 2004:14). This is important; discourse analysts do not deny that structures of human relations exist. Rather, any structures that do exist are partially instead of permanently fixed, rely on discursive construction and mediation, and could be subject to cessation if participants will it so. Discourses, including discourses of security, are not fixed phenomena (Doty, 1998:92); they are man-made and susceptible to change because either agents within the discourse alter them (internal) or factors outside of the discourse force a structural change, such as a scientific revelation or an otherwise significant incident (external).

That being said, discourse has to have at least some temporarily fixed meaning in order to exert influence on policy and human action. A completely ethereal and ever-mercurial discourse would not be able to exert such an influence because the agents engaging with that discourse would be unable to find mutually agreeable definitions and ‘nodal’ points of discussion. As Baker-Beall has noted, the “partial fixing within discourse is important in the sense that it allows us to ‘know’ and act upon what we ‘know’” (2016:32). Identifying this partial fixing can be described as locating the ‘momentary essence’; the ‘momentary essence’, “the aspect of its structure by which it is able to have an effect at some specified moment” (Banta, 2012:391). By definition, the condition of ‘knowing’ something relies upon a knowledge of what it ‘is not’. The tenet of identity and the process of identification are both key here. As Aradau has written, “all signification is based on differentiation…. [N]o identity can be self-identical and no alterity is pure – both are enmeshed and identities are dependent upon the traces of other identities” (2010:108). We could therefore describe discourse as a process that categorises and packages phenomena through binary classifications, so that human language can interpret and redistribute knowledge, much like a computer’s CPU relies upon the conversion of signals into binary code. Influenced by Derrida’s (1981) philosophical writing, this is Milliken’s (1999:229) second commitment of discourse studies. Importantly, this binary opposition engenders a power relation; one element of the binary opposition is said to be privileged over the other.

Securitisation theory, which will be addressed in greater detail in the next chapter, revolves around the privileging of one identity – the referent object – over another identity that is deemed to be threatening its existence. Identity is a recurrent theme underpinning the process of meaning-making in the discourse that is mapped and analysed in the subsequent chapters, as identity is a central component of the articulations that permit securitisation processes to exist and have meaning. Indeed, the subjective perception of “insecurity becomes the product of processes of identity construction in which the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, or multiple ‘others’ are constituted” (Shepherd and Weldes, 2007:532). The binaries of threatening or protective identities become cemented in legislation, thereby enforcing a rigid delineation between acceptable, legal activity and unacceptable, illegal activity. In the case of terror and counterterror, a securitised discourse would act to delineate between permissible violence and illegitimate violence.

In principle, a change in the acceptability of a discourse is required in order for its related legislation to be debated, mediated, passed, and applied. For instance, in 1986, Robert Schifreen and Stephen Gold became the first British nationals convicted for the illegal breaching of a computer system when they accessed the Duke of Edinburgh’s Telecom Gold ¹ account. They were convicted under the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981, and the conviction was repealed on appeal because hacking was not within the legal remit of forgery. The actions committed by Schifreen and Gold, which were normatively illegal in official discourse, were not, at the time, explicitly illegal in the written, legislated discourse of British law. To address this legislative deficit, the Computer Misuse Act 1990 (CMA) made any unauthorised accessing of a program or data a criminal offence, punishable with a maximum penalty of a five year incarceration term (Legislation.gov.uk, 1990). A computer program or data offense could also be prosecuted through the Terrorism Act 2000 under certain circumstances. The next section details process through which sources were acquired.

Source acquisition

Public-facing discourse relating to the threat of cyberterrorism became markedly prominent in British political discourse from 2010 onwards. This is not to say that there was a saturation of discourse concerning cyberterrorism; but the elevation in discourse was of course relative to a near-dearth in cyberterrorism discussion preceding 2010. Nonetheless, it was important to establish a cogent process for collecting and understanding the threads underpinning this discourse. The source-acquisition method applied here has been inspired by that formerly used by Hansen (2006:59–64), in her Security as Practice. Accordingly, Hansen (2006) proposes four routes to the study of securitisation: (1) the official discourse of the government, (2) political opposition and the media, (3) cultural representations and popular culture, and lastly (4) marginal political discourses emanating from non-government organisations and academia. Like Croft (2012:99–100), I believe that there are significant rewards for both one’s analysis and findings by addressing all four of these pools of sources. However, due to the space constraints of a book, the corpus that has been mapped and analysed in the subsequent chapters includes the official discourse of the government and the discourse exhibited by the Opposition, backbench MPs, and Peers. The Ministerial contributions are the foremost focus of analysis, given that those speaking on behalf of the government and the security agencies are the actors who are capable of signalling and making calls for securitisation. It is from these sources, which include resources such as security strategies, officially sanctioned reports, and interviews with Ministerial figures, that one may locate the language and metaphors raising the spectre of securitisation. Accordingly, official governmental sources are the overriding occupation of Chapter 3 in particular, which traces the emergence of cyberterrorism as a significant threat by the government. Chapter 5 will also consider Hansen’s inferred third pool of sources. Giving credence to the role of popular culture is not frivolous, particularly in the case of cyberterrorism; indeed, cyberterrorism emerged from fictional authorship in the 1980s and was nurtured by popular culture until arguably the late 1990s or even the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington in September 2001.

Sources were selected from the time period 12th May 2010 to 24th June 2016. This time period, spanning six years, was selected because it represents the tenure of David Cameron’s premiership as Prime Minister leading a Coalition Government from May 2010 to May 2015 to his premiership of a majority Conservative Government until his resignation announcement following the June 2016 European Referendum result. This is not to say that David Cameron and his Cabinet are the chief authors of the UK’s cyberterrorist-as-threat narrative, nor is it to imply that considering events before May 2010 and after June 2016 would be superfluous. Rather, Cameron’s six-year tenure as Prime Minster of the UK provides a contemporary duration from which I was able to draw sources. Disallowing material outside of the premiership of David Cameron reduced the variable factor that would be present had one included the tenure of another Prime Minister. A Major–Blair–Brown–Cameron–May genealogical study would be an interesting approach; however, this is not the focus of this book. Furthermore, the threat of cyberterrorism to the UK was not publicly detailed as a ‘Tier One’ threat by the government until the publication of the Coalition’s National Security Strategy (Cabinet Office, 2010:11). Whilst the strands that are mapped in the subsequent chapters could be traced further back in time beyond May 2010, the central strand upon which the securitisation of cyberterrorism rested – that cyber-terrorism represented a severe or ‘Tier One’ threat to the UK – was only formally established in 2010.

The years 2010–2016 represent a timespan during which the UK was more connected to, and reliant on, internet-mediated communications than in any six years previously in British history. This time period also saw significant developments that had at least some form of impact on the security narratives, such as the Snowden revelations in 2013 and the UK’s first mature political debates about surveillance in the internet age. The period from May 2010 to June 2016 also represents a timespan during which the classification of the threat from interna...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: locating the ‘cyberterrorist’ within cyberspace and academia
• 1 Interpreting the construction of hypothetical threatening actors in cyberspace
• 2 The discursive construction of the threat of cyberterrorism to the UK
• 3 Running out of time: cyberterrorism as a temporally distinct threat
• 4 Locating the cyberterrorist: cyberterrorism as a spatially unique threat
• 5 Narrating the cyberterrorist: from fiction to reality
• Conclusion
• Index