There is perhaps no greater film institution than the James Bond franchise. Over 27 movies and 59 years from Doctor No (1962) to Goldfinger (1964) to the modern era of Goldeneye (1995) and Skyfall (2012), Bond is a touchstone in many people lives, although not without...
Courtesy of US Navy, used under Creative Commons license. This is a guest post by William Akoto, a postdoctoral researcher jointly appointed at the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International...
This post is a co-authored piece: Heather M. Roff, Jamie Winterton and Nadya Bliss of Arizona State's Global Security Initiative We’ve recently been informed that the Clinton campaign relied heavily...
Rousseau once remarked that “It is, therefore, very certain that compassion is a natural sentiment, which, by moderating the activity of self-esteem in each individual, contributes to the mutual...
I have yet to weigh in on the recent hack on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Mostly this is due to two reasons. First is the obvious one for an academic: it is summer! But the second, well, that is due to the fact that as most cyber events go, this one continues to unfold. When we learned of the OPM hack earlier this month, the initial figures were 4 million records. That is, 4 million present and former government employees’ personal records were compromised. This week, we’ve learned that it is more like 18 million. While some argue that this hack is not something to be...
The Department of Defense’s (DoD) new Cyber Strategy is a refinement of past attempts at codifying and understanding the “new terrain” of cybersecurity threats to the United States. While I actually applaud many of the acknowledgements in the new Strategy, I am still highly skeptical of the DoD’s ability to translate words to deeds. In particular, I am so because the entire Strategy is premised on the fact that the “DoD cannot defend every network and system against every kind of intrusion” because the “total network attack surface is too large to defend against all threats and too vast to...
Last week the New America Foundation hosted its launch for an interdisciplinary cybersecurity initiative. I was fortunate enough to be asked to attend and speak, but the real benefit was that I was afforded an opportunity to listen to some really remarkable people in the cyber community discuss cybersecurity, law, and war. I listened to a few very interesting comments. For instance, Assistant Attorney General, John Carlin, claimed that “we” (i.e. the United States) have “solved the attribution problem, and the National Security Agency Director & Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) Commander,...
We hear every day that technology is changing rapidly, and that we are at risk of others violating our rights through digital means. We hear about cyber attacks that steal data, such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, names, incomes, or addresses. We hear about attacks that steal intellectual property, from movies to plans for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Indeed, we face a continual onslaught from not only the cyber criminals, but from the media as well. One of the lesser-reported issues in the US, however, has been a different discussion about data and rights protection:...
In last night’s State of the Union Address, President Obama briefly reiterated the point that Congress has an obligation to pass some sort of legislation that would enable cybersecurity to protect “our networks”, our intellectual property and “our kids.” The proposal appears to be a reiteration that companies share more information with the government in real time about hacks they are suffering. Yet, there is something a bit odd about the President Obama’s cybersecurity call to arms: the Sony hack. The public attention given over to the Sony hack, from the embarrassing emails about movie...
By now I am sure many of you have seen the news that Sony has indefinitely postponed/canceled the theatrical release of The Interview under threat from hackers apparently connected to the regime in North Korea. It is not clear whether the threat was explicitly against movie goers or against the companies screening the film, and whether the assault would be virtual or physical in form (although the Obama Administration has suggested the theatre threat was overblown and has criticized Sony for withholding the film). What is clear is that the cancellation costs Sony tens of millions of dollars...
In the thirteenth century, before the rise of the “modern” state, private enforcement mechanisms reigned supreme. In fact, because monarchs of the time had difficulties enforcing laws within their jurisdictions, the practice of private individuals enforcing their rights was so widespread that for the sovereign to be able to “reign supreme” while his subjects simultaneously acted as judge, jury and executioner, the practice of issuing “letters of marque and reprisal” arose. Merchants traveling from town to town or even on the high seas often became the victims of pirates, brigands and...
Cyber security has been on the general security agenda for some time now, but it is only recently that Political Scientists have really engaged the topic in a serious manner befitting of the theoretical and empirical advances in the field. In general, we have ceded this ground to those who either have a vested interest in the question (the cyber security industry) or to those who seek to inflate the threat based on imagined fears. This blog will review some recent work in the field and evaluate the state of knowledge plus future directions. Many pundits comment and pontificate on cyber...