Abstract
The conceptualization of cyber security is currently in the making. In the last decade, the frequent concerns with power and control in the cyber space, coupled with attempts at diminishing the risks posed by ‘invisible actors’ to critical infrastructure while ensuring free access, have represented real challenges to the adoption of national cyber security frameworks. In spite of the wide acknowledgement of cyber threats as a global problem, limited efforts to adopt a common approach towards reducing risks were undertaken till now at the international level. With more than 26% of world’s population using the Internet as of 2009 (ITU 2010: ix), the cyber risks are growing. According to Libicki, only in the US, the “estimates of the damage from today’s cyber attacks range from hundreds of billions of dollars to just a few billion dollars per year” (2009: xv).
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Notes
- 1.
In “Economy and Society”, Max Weber provides the definition of the state as a political organization “upholding the claim to the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical violence in the enforcement of its orders” (1952b: 29).
- 2.
See Braman 2007.
- 3.
Cyberspace is a term coined by William Gibson, who described it as “a consensual hallucination… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the back of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding” (Gibson 1985: 51).
- 4.
For a full overview of the taxonomy of definitions of information, see Braman (2007).
- 5.
/11 refers to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001.
- 6.
Critical infrastructure protection does not refer only to preemptive actions, being “also about technology of control, constituting both a threat and a means of protection” (Dunn Cavelty and Kristensen 2008: 5).
- 7.
Digitalization of values refers to the sources of value existent in the online realm; high dependence on ICT for business profits or large digital networks increases the risk of targeted attacks (Kshetri 2005).
- 8.
Back in 1990, in his book entitled Powershift: knowledge, wealth and violence at the edge of the 21 st century, Toffler asserted that, in the age of new technology, “power, which to a large extent defines us as individuals and as nations, is itself being redefined” (Toffler 1990: 7).
- 9.
Accordingly, “power applies to immediate everyday life which categorises the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on his which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power, which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and ties to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to” (Foucault 1983: 212).
- 10.
Barnes (1988: 57) explains that “any specific distribution of knowledge confers a generalized capacity for action upon those individuals who carry and constitute it, and that capacity for action is their social power, the power of the society they constitute by bearing and sharing the knowledge in question. Social power is the added capacity for action that accrues to individuals through their constituting a distribution of knowledge and thereby a society”.
- 11.
This understanding is similar to that of capabilities (Hart 1989).
- 12.
Though attacks were sometimes claimed by individual hackers, a dominant state interest is not excluded.
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Radu, R.G. (2012). The Monopoly of Violence in the Cyber Space: Challenges of Cyber Security. In: Fels, E., Kremer, JF., Kronenberg, K. (eds) Power in the 21st Century. Global Power Shift. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25082-8_8
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