Read more about the article A Brief Summary of the 2021 Senate Intel Committee Hearing

A Brief Summary of the 2021 Senate Intel Committee Hearing

You slept in and missed the Senate Intel Committee hearing on worldwide threats. No problem, I'll give you a rundown.The top 5 threats to the US right now are China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and terrorism. Haines, the ODNI director, broke it down:China: competition in the cyber, space, and geographic spaces. A "near peer". They have their own demographic challenges.Russia: interested in asymmetric conflict (cyberrrrr) with the goal of weakening the USIran: regionally crucial, Iraq…

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Read more about the article CYBERWARCON Recap
US Capital Building

CYBERWARCON Recap

CYBERWARCON was a one-day conference held in Arlington, VA on November 28.  Talks were about threat analysis, covering advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks and information operations (IO). For me, the conference demonstrated its value by supplanting sensationalism with concrete operational insights. Here's some of my takeaways from the talks. Please forgive my fuzzy pictures! Thomas Reid The wider socio-political context may be necessary to understand forensics.Exposing part of an IO can sustain it. Camille Francois…

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Read more about the article New Priorities, Old Denial

New Priorities, Old Denial

Recently, I attended an event featuring Ambassador Liliana Ayalde, the Civilian Deputy to the Commander and Foreign Policy Advisor to the United States Southern Command. The event was moderated by Ambassador Paul Trivelli, who was also once the Civilian Deputy to Southern Command. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) is one of the ten unified combatant commands "responsible for providing contingency planning, operations, and security cooperation in its assigned Area of Responsibility which includes: Central America South America…

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Cyberpolitics in International Relations

[In Progress]

Choucri, Nazli. Cyberpolitics in international relations. MIT press, 2012.

Review

td;dr Traditional IR theory stinks. Also, computers are a thing people should care about.

Cyberpolitics is one of first books that pushed the IR community to think about cybersecurity in a meaningful way. Choucri argues that cyberspace constitutes a new “space”, and as such, “provide[s] opportunities for expanding power and influence in world politics” (p. 5).

Choucri argues that traditional IR theory has failed us. It is static, state-focused, unable to combine perspectives, and ignorant or unwilling to address change.  IR theory must be modified to address cyberspace.

Below are some of my notes, with definitions and quotes. I recommend you check out Clark’s model of cyberspace for an IR-cyber stack.

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