Cyber-Conflict and Global Politics

Athina Karatzogianni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134045815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

This volume examines theoretical and empirical issues relating to cyberconflict and its implications for global security and politics.

Taking a multidimensional approach to current debates in internet politics, the book comprises essays by leading experts from across the world. The volume includes a comprehensive introduction to current debates in the field and their ramifications for global politics, and follows this with empirical case studies. These include cyberconflict, cyberwars, information warfare and hacktivism, in contexts such as Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Estonia, the European Social Forum, feminist cybercrusades and the use of the internet as a weapon by ethnoreligious and socio-political movements. The volume presents the theoretical debates and case studies of cyberconflict in a coherent, progressive and truly multidisciplinary way.

The book will be of interest to students of cyberconflict, internet politics, security studies and IR in general.

1 Introduction

New media and the reconfiguration of power in global politics

Athina Karatzogianni

Neo-liberal governments and institutions face a counter-hegemonic account of globalization, to which they have responded in a confused and often contradictory manner. One of the interesting sides to the argument is that the information revolution is altering the nature of conflict by strengthening network forms of organization over hierarchical forms. In contrast to the closure of space, the violence and identity divide found in ethnoreligious discourses, sociopolitical movements seem to rely more on networking and rhizomatic structures. US power is increasingly faced with resistance movements operating on a network model and utilizing new information technologies.

These movements can be divided into two broad groups; ethnoreligious movements and sociopolitical movements. (Of course, there are cultural and lifestyle activism movements but I would not make it my concern here). To suppress both kinds of movements, the US state relies on a binary, repressive mode of identity-construction, which divides the world into ‘them and us’. This approach is guaranteed to escalate rather than resolve conflict. Its effects include the corrosion of civil and human rights and, most importantly, the increasing isolation of the would-be power-holders amid a sea of swarming resistances and uncontrollable spaces and flows. From ‘with us or against us’, domination therefore evolves into ‘with or without you’ (Karatzogianni and Robinson 2004, 2009, forthcoming).

An example of the struggle to restrict and control the flow of anti-American propaganda is the effort by the US Defense Department to block soldiers from accessing sites like YouTube and MySpace on its networks and their decision to launch their own Multi-National Force–Iraq broadcasts. Having said that, the military personnel in Iraq have never been allowed access anyway. The ban really affects military personnel globally, who nevertheless can afford to access through private service providers anyway, use closed systems like Army Knowledge Online, or Internet cafes, bypassing the ban from the DoD Internet. What is ironic, but hardly surprising, is that this policy comes straight after a decision to create an official military do-it-yourself under the YouTube video-sharing mechanism. The logic is that if soldiers are blogging and vlogging, they should at least do it under military censorship and approval and channel their journalistic/ cameramen ambitions in a controlled and filtered manner.

Channelling videos in a controlled manner is much more preferable for the military than having soldiers jeopardizing the reputation of the multinational forces, as has been the case in the past. It also produces an image of a military that is consistent with the current developments and embraces the technologies used by advanced countries and their citizens worldwide. Yet, it remains doubtful that these videos will have an effect in the periphery of the world system, where many people have yet to make a phone call. On a different issue, families of soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere are used to censorship. Regrettably, I think what will take some time to get used to is watching their loved ones fighting a war in online videos.

Nevertheless, this is part of an unprecedented operational tactic to counter the propaganda, organization, mobilization and recruiting techniques of Islamist extremist groups. The paramount example of this is Al-Qaeda’s web presence and that of its affiliates. The Al-Qaeda network and its ideology relies more on common religious affiliation and kinship networks than strict national identity, which fits well with the borderless and network character of the Internet. Significant is also the fact that the Internet has been used as a primary mobilizational tool, especially after the breakdown of cells in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. On the Internet, Al-Qaeda is replicating recruitment and training techniques and evading security services, because they cannot be physically intercepted, due to the virtuality of their networks. The Internet is used by radical Islamist groups under the ideological umbrella global ‘ummah’ as a propaganda tool via electronic magazines, training manuals and general recruitment sites, as well as a weapon for disruptions aiming at financing operations, or stealing data and blueprints (see Chapter 5, this volume).

Further, recognizing the medium and countering the enemy’s web presence is not the only reason for this current development in media policy. The past decade the US military has been consistently advised by thinktanks to exploit new information technologies and create and sustain a more network-based approach to warfare, utilizing psychological and information warfare and ‘winning the hearts and minds of the population’. Especially post 9/11 and with the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military has finally recognized the need to utilize new media and social networking technologies to tap into a younger American audience, recruit and mobilize global public opinion under a more favourable light of how this war is fought and why (on the question of public opinion and radicalization see Chapter 3, this volume).

Until very recently, the US military has been uncomfortable and clueless of how to deal with the uncontrollable and anarchic dimensions of the web, if efforts at cracking down on milbloggers and banning digital cameras following the Abu Ghraib scandal are anything to go by (see Chapter 4, this volume). The institution of embedded journalists and the crackdown of unilaterals in Iraq ensured a patriotic media in the US, and elsewhere, however this could not compensate for the increasing relevance of Al-Jazeera English, BBC World and France 24, their online equivalents and ‘alternative’ media services and bloggers/ vloggers (video) found on the web, indicating a transformation in the field of global communications due to the advent of the Internet and its affiliated technologies (see Chapter 2, this volume).

As the war continues, and domestic public support for the war decreases in the US, the military had no choice but to create a global outlet for its multinational forces to bypass the global media which have become increasingly impatient of the war and more critical of its future. The YouTube videos of soldiers engaging with the local population, playing football with children and saving a kidnapped Iraqi is an effort to humanize an inhuman war. Nine out of ten top videos on YouTube are indeed military operations, ‘a boots on the ground perspective’. What you see in these videos are soldiers that are simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable fighting a war in front of a camera. It is a pornography of the simultaneous pride and suffering of these soldiers and the Iraqi population to an increasingly insensitivized audience.

The utilization of You Tube by the military raises important questions revolving around how information is released in the public domain and why, how much censorship is taking place and what alternative sources of information are available. These questions have to be posed in an analysis of the anti-Iraq war/ pro-war, anti-Islamic pro-Islamic cyberconflicts we are witnessing today. The way a war is communicated is as important as the conduct of the war itself. Among many examples, the counter-propaganda YouTube effort by the Multi-National Force – Iraq confirms that individuals and protagonists can now send stories more quickly than military press releases and mainstream journalists, indicating that civilian and military bloggers will have an independent capability to access future conflict arenas and to provide real-time visual and audio coverage of battlefield events. This has consequences for news management, even by very powerful states like the US.

In analysing the March 2003 Iraq conflict, the Internet’s role in the conflict was studied in terms of its effect on the organization and spread of the movement, and its impact on war coverage and war-related cyberconflicts. The latter involved hacking between anti-war and pro-war hacktivists (sociopolitical cyberconflict), but also between pro-Islamic and anti-Islamic hackers (ethnoreligious cyberconflict) (Karatzogianni 2006).

On the sociopolitical cyberconflict field, the Internet played a distinctive role in the spread of the peace movement, on war coverage and on war-related cyber-conflicts, rendering the full potential of the new medium in politics and information undisputable. In the months preceding the actual war in Iraq, a plenitude of phenomena on and off the Internet emerged, which in previous international conflicts were only embryonic. Before and during the war in Iraq, mobilization structures appear to have been greatly affected by the Internet. Peace groups organized demonstrations and events through the Internet, to the effect that ten million people protested against the war globally, with the net speeding up mobilization remarkably. It helped mobilization in loose coalitions of small groups that organized very quickly, at the same time preserving the particularity of distinct groups in network forms of organization. Anti-war groups used email lists and websites, group text messages and chatrooms to organize protests, and in some cases, to engage in symbolic hacking against the opposite viewpoint. Accordingly, the anti-war movement succeeded in that respect at gradually building their own image of the Americans and their allies and framing their message (no WMD, dodgy dossiers, humanitarian concerns, etc.). The integration of the Internet into mainstream media, the effect of online material challenging official government sources and the mainstream media, and blogging, are threatening the status quo countries and their representations in the global public sphere.

In terms of censorship, the latest literature supports the idea that journalists were not only censored and manipulated, but also targeted in this conflict – which brings up the issue of whether the US could control information. Apparently, through psychological operations, they could manipulate the conflict and control the media, especially the American mainstream media (almost always submissive to the patriotic/nationalistic discourse after 9/11). However, the current change of US broadcasting in doubting the effectiveness of the administration’s efforts, and the military’s inability to control inconsistencies and fiascos from twenty-four-hour Internet coverage or to manipulate the American image in the Muslim world, has forced the military to reconsider its media tactics. All these developments are indications of where future conflict is going. The US military utilizes its younger generation of officers, some of which are part of the Internet generation, to reach audiences at home and abroad in an effort to win the information war running parallel in cyberspace to the overly media-manipulated conflict in the battleground.

One of the major differences between Vietnam and even the 1991 Gulf War, is that the Internet has revolutionized not only coverage but has acted as a resource and weapon for the opposing parties in conflicts, a tool for organization, mobilization and recruiting, even conflict resolution and hacktivism. In the ‘first living room war’, the Vietnam War, despite the fact that the network news deserve credit for the eventual disillusionment with the war, at the same time they were also responsible for creating, or at least reinforcing, the illusion of American omnipotence in the first place. An example of this was that American media delayed for two years the reporting of the My Lai massacre, not because of censorship, nor because the facts were not instantly available, but due to resistance to the story by the US media itself. That was because the massacre occurred in 1967, when the storyline was focused on ‘good news’ about a war which, editors were persuaded, the US was winning. There are some parallels to be found with the Gulf War in 1991, however the major difference is that due to the speeds of twenty-four-hour coverage and alternative reporting and blogging challenging the mainstream media in the online public sphere, the time the mainstream media waste on patriotism and disillusionment is remarkably decreased due to the checks and balances imposed by the Internet revolution.

A further part of the cyberconflict environment is cyberterrorism: computer-based attacks intended to intimidate or coerce governments or societies in pursuit of goals that are political, religious or ideological. According to Arquilla and Ronfeldt (2001c), conflicts increasingly revolve around knowledge and the use of soft power. This would come about with the help of information-age ideologies in which identities and loyalties shift from the nation-state to the transnational level of global civil society (see Chapter 8, this volume). Additionally, netwar is referred to as the low, societal type of struggle, while cyberwar refers more to the heavy information warfare type.

Cyberconflicts can act as a ‘barometer’ of real-life conflicts and can reveal the natures and the conflicts of the participating groups. The protagonists in sociopolitical cyberconflicts fight for participation, power and democracy. Evident in the anti-globalization and the anti-capitalist movement is an alternative programme for the reform of society, asking for democracy and more participation from the ‘underdogs’, be they in the West or in the developing world. In the anti-war movement, which is a single-issue movement, the demand is for a change in power relations in favour of those who believe the war to be unjustified. In new social movements, networking through the Internet links diverse communities such as labour, feminist, ecological, peace and anti-capitalist groups, with the aim of challenging public opinion and battling for media access and coverage. Groups are being brought together like a parallelogram of forces, following a swarm logic, indicating a web of horizontal solidarities to which power might be devolved or even dissolved. The Internet encourages a version of the commons that is ungoverned and ungovernable, either by corporate interests or by leaders and parties (for a theorization of electronic civil disobedience see Chapter 12, this volume; for conflicts in netarchical capitalism see Chapter 14, this volume).

Mobilization structures, for instance, are greatly affected by the Internet, since the peace groups used the Internet to organize demonstrations and events, to mobilize in loose coalitions of small groups that organize very quickly, and to preserve the particularity of distinct groups in network forms of organization. Moreover, the framing process was also affected, since email lists and websites are used to mobilize, changing the framing of the message to suit the new medium (see for instance Kavada’s analysis of the organizing processes of the European Social Forum, Chapter 13, this volume). The political opportunity structure in this particular case refers to alternative media, but also to an opening of political space, or an opening of global politics to people who, previously, would not or could not get as involved (for instance see Ganeshpanchan’s examination of web activism against gender violence, Chapter 11, this volume).

Dissidents against governments are able to use a variety of Internet-based techniques (email lists, email spamming, BBS, peer-to-peer and e-magazines) to spread alternative frames for events and a possible alternative online democratic public sphere. An example of dissidents’ use of the Internet is spamming e-magazines to an unprecedented number of people within China, a method which provides recipients with ‘plausible deniability’. Also, proxy servers, file-trading networks like Kazaa and Gnutella can help dissidents communicate, since they have no central source and are hard to turn off.

Ethnoreligious cyberconflicts primarily include hacking enemy sites and creating sites for propaganda and mobilizational purposes. In ethnoreligious cyberconflicts, despite the fact that patriotic hackers can network, there is a greater reliance on traditional ideas, such as protecting the nation or fatherland and attacking for nationalist reasons. The ‘Other’ is portrayed as the enemy, through very closed, old and primordialist ideas of belonging to an imagined community (for the impact on the Sri Lankan conflict see Chapter 10, this volume).

The Israeli–Palestinian cyberconflict saw the use of national symbols (like the Israeli flag, Hebrew text and even a recording of the Israeli national anthem) when hacking the Hezbollah homepage. This explicitly draws attention to issues of national identity, nationalism and ethnicity. Also, the language used by hackers relies on an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality, where Israelis and their American supporters, or else Palestinians and Muslims, are portrayed as barbaric, reflecting discourses of inclusion and exclusion. The Internet in this cyberconflict became a battleground and was used as a weapon by both sides, and full-scale action by thousands of Israeli and Palestinian youngsters involved both racist emails and circulating of instructions on how to crush the enemy’s websites. Similarly, in the Indian–Pakistani cyberconflict, the Indian army’s website was set up as a propaganda tool, and hacked pictures of alleged tortures of Kashmiris by Indians were placed on the site, in a similar propaganda tactic. Also, the Internet was used as a weapon, when the worm Yaha was released by Indian hackers. In particular discourses, religion is mentioned (religious affiliation), the word ‘brothers’ (collective identity and solidarity), and ‘our country’, a promised land (Karatzogianni 2006; see also here Rawnsley’s analysis of the Taiwan Strait cyberconflict, Chapter 2, this volume).

The more recent Estonian cyberconflict is by no means then the first cyber-conflict. We have been witnessing conflict in computer-mediated environments as early as 1994. The reason the Estonian case has been coined the ‘first cyber-conflict or cyberwar’ is because a nation’s infrastructure was targeted in its entirety, in an orchestrated, unprecedented and sustained manner. The attackers used a giant network of bots, as many as one million computers, in places as far away as the United States, Peru, China and Vietnam to amplify the impact of their assault. As a sign of their financial resources, there is evidence that they rented time on other so-called botnets.

The scale of the Estonian cyberconflict points to the deficiency of the international community to regulate cyberconflict, to create mechanisms for defining and then reacting to cyberattacks on a state, especially one linked to NATO and the EU, in a sensitive geopolitical area (for regulation issues see Chapter 7, this volume). Despite the magnitude of a monthly assault on a country nicknamed e-Stonia, due to its reliance on online services, and the home of Internet pioneers, NATO sends experts to learn from it, refraining from directly addressing the allegations made by the Estonian government or challenging Russia’s standpoint.

Keeping the socioeconomic implications in mind, the real impact of the Estonian cyberconflict operates on multiple political levels. First, whether the attacks were by the Russian government, Russian diasporic communities, or more likely Ethnic Russians in Estonia, the fact remains that NATO does not yet define electronic attacks as military action even if the guilty party is identified. Second, information communication technologies are a very convenient and cost-effective tool for protest, but the real spark are the uncertainty about the enemy within and the anxiety about the always incomplete project of national purity so that ‘these geographies are the spatial outcome of complex interactions between faraway events and proximate fears, between old histories and new provocations, between rewritten borders and unwritten orders’, as Appadurai (2006) puts it. This cultural struggle, which integrates war and politics at the borders with vigilance and purification at the centres, is exacerbated by the media in general and by new communication technologies in particular. The fight to win the global war of messages, propaganda and ideas has often produced unpredictable results, especially in cyberspace. In essence, they are then defending the purity of their national space, and they do so by skilfully using online media technologies. To put it simply, globalization and its technologies can expose pathologies in the sacred ideologies of nationhood (for a discussion on small, virtual states and minorities online representations see, Chapter 9, this volume).

As today’s ethnic groups number in the hundreds and thousands, their mixtures, cultural style and media representations ‘create profound doubts about who exactly are among the “we” and who are among the “they” in the context of rapid migration or refugee movements, how many of “them are now among us”’ (Appadurai 2006). The statue and its removal in Estonia, and the cyberconflict that ensued is a reflection of the instability of the EU enlargement project, especially in relation to Russia’s hegemonic aspirations, energy disputes and legacy in the region, pointing to an emerging second Cold asymmetric War by Russia, such as the recent missiles dispute with the US and Russia’s relentless involvement in the region as a whole (supporting secessionist states, intervening in coloured revolutions, embargoing products, etc.).

In the final analysis, the true bigger picture must include a recognition that Russia is an oligopoly (some even goes as far as to say a dictatorship cracking down on civil liberties), not to say that the US is the paragon of democracy, holding together through the illusion of still providing a countervoice to US imperialism. As the US has a lot currently on its plate, any future action in defence of NATO countries in the former Soviet sphere of influence will destabilize consensus on the war on terror. Ultimately, regulation and prevention of cyberconflict and its future implications might indeed require a bigger electronic Pearl Harbor than that of the Estonian cyberconflict.

It seems that the accusations against the Chinese attempting cyber-espionage might be a turning point of how seriously governments take cyberconflicts and their regulation. The Chinese government has denied that the Chinese military is to blame for the cyberattacks involving systematic network penetrations against the US, Britain,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: new media and the reconfiguration of power in global politics
• PART I Transforming media and global conflict
• PART II Global security and information warfare
• PART III Ethno/religio/cultural cyberconflicts
• PART IV Socio/politico/economic cyberconflicts
• Bibliography