"Cyberwar" As a Carrot For Those Selling the Stick

New submitter sackbut writes with a story at Wired about the often-discussed concept of "cyberwarfare," and the worst-case scenarios that are sometimes presented as possible outcomes of concerted malicious hacking. According to Wired, which calls these scenarios "the new yellowcake," "[E]vidence to sustain such dire warnings is conspicuously absent. In many respects, rhetoric about cyber catastrophe resembles threat inflation we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War. And while Congress' passing of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation wouldn't lead to war, it could saddle us with an expensive and overreaching cyber-industrial complex." Writes sackbut: "Perhaps good for programmers, but not so good for rights."

Comments

Now selling anti-cyber attack amulets!

[Kenja]

Guarantied to prevent cyber and leopard attacks.

Re:21st century--The era of perpetual war

[forkfail]

You should know that Eurasia is our friends, and that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Or do you need a reminder?

Re:21st century--The era of perpetual war

[dreemernj]

I don't care about what wars we're fighting. I'm just enjoying my 20 grammes of chocolate.

Re:21st century--The era of perpetual war

[Anthony Mouse]

Orwell tried to warn us. See also his work on the use of language and using it as an agent of control (Chomsky says basically the same thing).

Orwell got a lot of things right, but his arguments about use of language were pretty wrong. You can't actually create Newspeak. If you start calling copyright infringement piracy, people start to think that pirates are cool and piracy means sticking it to The Man. If you decide that calling it piracy is no longer cutting it and start calling it theft, people will soon start making references to Robin Hood instead of Captain Jack Sparrow. (You must admit that the pigopolists bear a closer resemblance to the Sheriff of Nottingham than they do to the British Navy.)

Chomsky has it more right, but despite being a linguist his points aren't as much about language as information: The issue is that selection bias allows you to tell part of the truth, and then defy anyone to prove that your biased selection is empirically false rather than merely intentionally incomplete, leaving the general public with the impression that the things the media says are irrefutable because no one is allowed any opportunity to refute them. In other words, the problem is not that powerful people choose what you are allowed to say or even how you are allowed to say it, it is that the content of your message determines how large of an audience you are allowed to reach.