1NC

1st of
Cyber fear rhetoric is based of the lack of borders their
insistence on geographies of exclusion is otherizing.
Bialasiewicz et al 7, - Luiza Bialasiewicz a, David Campbell b, Stuart Elden b,
Stephen Graham b, Alex Jeffrey c, Alison J. Williams a Department of Geography,
Royal Holloway University of London, United Kingdom b International Boundaries
Research Unit, Geography Department, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE,
United Kingdom c School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, University of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom, Performing security: The imaginative
geographies of current US strategy Political Geography 26 (2007) 405e422, via
sciencedirect.com)
Abroad, one contradiction between the moral cartography of terror and the
spatiality of globalization can be found in the attention US national security
discourse pays to the deepening connectivity between domestic US space and
burgeoning circuits of computer communication, electronic transaction, and
organized criminal activity. Significant here is the US militarys discussion of the risk
of cyber-terrorism; their efforts to clamp down on transitional financial dealings of
alleged terrorist sympathizers; or their analyses of the biological pathogens which
routinely flow around the worlds airline and shipping systems (The White House,
2002a). These bring into being a world in which everything and everywhere is
perceived as a border from which a potentially threatening Other can leap (Hage,
2003: 86). Such a world of porosity, flow and rhizomatic, fibrous connectivities is
deeply at odds with the imaginative geographies of exclusion and their moral
cartography.

The afs scenarios of insecurity are not isolated, but rather

demonstrations of a permanent condition. Insecurity will
always exist, the unknown will always be out of reach,
absolute control is impossible, and certainty will remain
uncertain. Their hold on this mentality of resentment destroys
value to life and produces safe truths only our alternative
can reorient this mindset.
James Der Derian 3 is a Watson Institute research professor of international
studies (Brown University), 1993, The Political Subject of Violence,
http://www.ciaonet.org/book/lipschutz/lipschutz12.html)
Nietzsche transvalues both Hobbes's and Marx's interpretations of security through
a genealogy of modes of being. His method is not to uncover some deep meaning
or value for security, but to destabilize the intolerable fictional identities of the past
which have been created out of fear, and to affirm the creative differences which
might yield new values for the future. 33 Originating in the paradoxical relationship
of a contingent life and a certain death, the history of security reads for Nietzsche
as an abnegation, a resentment and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox. In

brief, the history is one of individuals seeking an impossible security from the most
radical "other" of life, the terror of death which, once generalized and nationalized,
triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien others--who
are seeking similarly impossible guarantees. It is a story of differences taking on the
otherness of death, and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness. Since
Nietzsche has suffered the greatest neglect in international theory, his
reinterpretation of security will receive a more extensive treatment here. One must
begin with Nietzsche's idea of the will to power, which he clearly believed to be
prior to and generative of all considerations of security. In Beyond Good and Evil ,
he emphatically establishes the primacy of the will to power: "Physiologists should
think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of
an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is
will to power; self-preservation is only one of the most frequent results." 34 The
will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian perpetual desire for
power. It can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only
power, leading, in Nietzsche's view, to a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to
a positive will to power, an active and affective force of becoming, from which
values and meanings--including self-preservation--are produced which affirm life.
Conventions of security act to suppress rather than confront the fears endemic to
life, for ". . . life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is
alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms,
incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation--but why should one always
use those words in which slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages." 35
Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in life: "life is a
consequence of war, society itself a means to war ." 36 But the denial of this
permanent condition, the effort to disguise it with a consensual rationality or to hide
from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear. The
desire for security is manifested as a collective resentment of difference--that which
is not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the
fear-driven desire for protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power,
which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth produces
a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally
sustainable. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks of the reader: "Look, isn't our need
for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything
strange, unusual, and questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not
the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain
knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?" 37 The
fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to produce a domesticated
life, in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self,
the surest protection against contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that
everything reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security
imperative produces, and is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to
explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this generative relationship in The
Twilight of the Idols: The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by,
the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own
sake so much as for a particular kind of cause --a cause that is comforting,
liberating and relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been

experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some
kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and
preferred kind of explanation--that which most quickly and frequently abolished the
feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual
explanations. 38 A safe life requires safe truths. The strange and the alien remain
unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility-recycling the desire for security. The "influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it,
creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the
"necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a
straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences." 39 The unknowable which
cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the off-world.
"Trust," the "good," and other common values come to rely upon an "artificial
strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in
being able to trust, to be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to
the illusion of being protected by a god." 40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false
sense of security can come from false gods: "Morality and religion belong altogether
to the psychology of error : in every single case, cause and effect are confused; or
truth is confused with the effects of believing something to be true; or a state of
consciousness is confused with its causes." 41 Nietzsche's interpretation of the
origins of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and transvaluation
of security. In The Genealogy of Morals , Nietzsche sees religion arising from a sense
of fear and indebtedness to one's ancestors: The conviction reigns that it is only
through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists
--and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments: one thus
recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease,
in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages
and new strength.

Security logic creates a self fulfilling prophecy projections of

future developments produce fears and actions that echo
distrust, sparking the threats they try to solve.
Michael C. Williams, Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Politics at
the University of Wales, Aberystwyth 2005 (The Realist Tradition and the Limits of
International Relations, ed. by Steve Smith (managing editor) et al., page 26)
From this perspective, perceptions of reality (and thus actions) are determined not
by current material circumstances alone, but by projec- tions of future
developments which precisely because they are imag- ined give rise to fears
and actions that bear little necessary relation to current realities or developments,
and which may be out of all propor- tion to the real situation facing actors. Acting
within the logic of worst case scenarios, Hobbesian individuals create an anarchic
state of nature in part out of their fear of future harm rather than the calm appraisal
of current realities. In so acting, they create the very conditions of dis- trust that
they fear. Logic, so necessary for prediction and preservation, becomes the source
of a destructive self-fulfilling prophecy: an illogical war of each against all.

The alternative is to reject the logic of security doing so is

the only way to avoid reactionary politics and open space for
new ways of thinking and speaking that avoid the debilitating
efects of securitization.
Neocleous, 2008 (Mark Neocleous, professor of the Critique of Political
Economy, Head of Department of Politics & History, Brunel University, Critique of
Security p. 185-186)
The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the
logic of security altogether - to reject it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the
state that any real political thought other than the authoritarian and reactionary
should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly something that cannot be achieved
within the limits of bourgeois thought and thus could never even begin to be
imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something that the constant iteration
of the refrain 'this is an insecure world' and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and
insecurity after another will also make it hard to do. But it is something that the
critique of security suggests we may have to consider if we want a political way out
of the impasse of security. This impasse exists because security has now become so
all-encompassing that it marginalises all else, most notably the constructiv e
conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The constant
prioritising of a mythical security as a political end - as the political end constitutes
a rejection of politics in any meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of
action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles
that arise from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people
might come to believe that another world is possible - that they might transform the
world and in turn be transformed. Security politics simply removes this; worse, it
removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all issues of
power and turns political questions into debates about the most efficient way to
achieve 'security', despite the fact that we are never quite told - never could be told
- what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this sense, an antipolitics,"' dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security
state tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the
monopolistic character of security on the political imagination. We therefore need to
get beyond security politics, not add yet more 'sectors' to it in a way that simply
expands the scope of the state and legitimises state intervention in yet more and
more areas of our lives. Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with
Michael Williams, co-editor of the important text Critical Security Studies, in which
the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole that's left
behind? But I'm inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole."' The mistake
has been to think that there is a hole and that this hole needs to be filled with a new
vision or revision of security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or gendered or
humanised or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the
statist political imaginary, and consequently end up reaffirming the state as the
terrain of modern politics, the grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the
supposed hole with yet another vision of security, but to fight for an alternative
political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois security
and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. That's

the point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to
the kind of society we want. Thus while much of what I have said here has been of a
negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the negative may be as
significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths. For if security really is
the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of
liberalism, then to keep harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding 'more
security' (while meekly hoping that this increased security doesn't damage our
liberty) is to blind ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the
authoritarian tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against
security politics would allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved
through the constant securitising of social and political issues, debilitating in the
sense that 'security' helps consolidate the power of the existing forms of social
domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most democratic forms. It
would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a different
conception of the good. We need a new way of thinking and talking about social
being and politics that moves us beyond security. This would perhaps be
emancipatory in the true sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must
be open to debate. But it certainly requires recognising that security is an illusion
that has forgotten it is an illusion; it requires recognising that security is not the
same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is part of the human
condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead
learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and 'insecurities' that come with
being human; it requires accepting that 'securitizing' an issue does not mean
dealing with it politically, but bracketing it out and handing it to the state; it requires
us to be brave enough to return the gift."'

Worst case logic isnt actual risk analysis it causes bad

decision making, social paralysis, violent escalation, and
ignorance while institutionalizing insecurity.
Schneier 10 (Bruce, Security Technologist, Author, MA in Computer Science
American University, Worst-Case Thinking, 3-13,
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/worst-case_thin.html)
At a security conference recently, the moderator asked the panel of distinguished
cybersecurity leaders what their nightmare scenario was. The answers were the
predictable array of large-scale attacks: against our communications infrastructure,
against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination with a physical
attack. I didn't get to give my answer until the afternoon, which was: "My nightmare
scenario is that people keep talking about their nightmare scenarios." There's a
certain blindness that comes from worst-case thinking. An extension of the
precautionary principle, it involves imagining the worst possible outcome and then
acting as if it were a certainty. It substitutes imagination for thinking, speculation for
risk analysis, and fear for reason. It fosters powerlessness and vulnerability and
magnifies social paralysis. And it makes us more vulnerable to the effects of
terrorism. Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several
reasons. First, it's only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs
and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can possibly go wrong,

and then acting as if that is likely to happen, worst-case thinking focuses only on
the extreme but improbable risks and does a poor job at assessing outcomes.
Second, it's based on flawed logic. It begs the question by assuming that a
proponent of an action must prove that the nightmare scenario is impossible . Third,
it can be used to support any position or its opposite. If we build a nuclear power
plant, it could melt down. If we don't build it, we will run short of power and society
will collapse into anarchy. If we allow flights near Iceland's volcanic ash, planes will
crash and people will die. If we don't, organs wont arrive in time for transplant
operations and people will die. If we don't invade Iraq, Saddam Hussein might use
the nuclear weapons he might have. If we do, we might destabilize the Middle East,
leading to widespread violence and death. Of course, not all fears are equal. Those
that we tend to exaggerate are more easily justified by worst-case thinking. So
terrorism fears trump privacy fears, and almost everything else; technology is hard
to understand and therefore scary; nuclear weapons are worse than conventional
weapons; our children need to be protected at all costs; and annihilating the planet
is bad. Basically, any fear that would make a good movie plot is amenable to worstcase thinking. Fourth and finally, worst-case thinking validates ignorance. Instead of
focusing on what we know, it focuses on what we don't know -- and what we can
imagine. Remember Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's quote? "Reports that say that
something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know,
there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there
are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
And this: "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Ignorance isn't a
cause for doubt; when you can fill that ignorance with imagination, it can be a call
to action. Even worse, it can lead to hasty and dangerous acts. You can't wait for a
smoking gun, so you act as if the gun is about to go off. Rather than making us
safer, worst-case thinking has the potential to cause dangerous escalation. The new
undercurrent in this is that our society no longer has the ability to calculate
probabilities. Risk assessment is devalued. Probabilistic thinking is repudiated in
favor of "possibilistic thinking": Since we can't know what's likely to go wrong, let's
speculate about what can possibly go wrong. Worst-case thinking leads to bad
decisions, bad systems design, and bad security. And we all have direct experience
with its effects: airline security and the TSA, which we make fun of when we're not
appalled that they're harassing 93-year-old women or keeping first graders off
airplanes. You can't be too careful! Actually, you can. You can refuse to fly because
of the possibility of plane crashes. You can lock your children in the house because
of the possibility of child predators. You can eschew all contact with people because
of the possibility of hurt. Steven Hawking wants to avoid trying to communicate with
aliens because they might be hostile; does he want to turn off all the planet's
television broadcasts because they're radiating into space? It isn't hard to parody
worst-case thinking, and at its extreme it's a psychological condition. Frank Furedi, a
sociology professor at the University of Kent, writes: " Worst-case thinking
encourages society to adopt fear as one of the dominant principles around which
the public, the government and institutions should organize their life. It
institutionalizes insecurity and fosters a mood of confusion and powerlessness.
Through popularizing the belief that worst cases are normal, it incites people to feel

defenseless and vulnerable to a wide range of future threats." Even worse, it plays
directly into the hands of terrorists, creating a population that is easily terrorized -even by failed terrorist attacks like the Christmas Day underwear bomber and the
Times Square SUV bomber. When someone is proposing a change, the onus should
be on them to justify it over the status quo. But worst-case thinking is a way of
looking at the world that exaggerates the rare and unusual and gives the rare much
more credence than it deserves. It isn't really a principle; it's a cheap trick to justify
what you already believe. It lets lazy or biased people make what seem to be
cogent arguments without understanding the whole issue. And when people don't
need to refute counterarguments, there's no point in listening to them.

The alternative opens a terrain of dissent for the judge to

assert their agency against securitizing exclusionary practices
while allowing us to push beyond a politics of security.
Burke 2 [Anthony, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of
New South Wales, Sydney, Alternatives 27]
It is perhaps easy to become despondent, but as countless struggles for freedom,
justice, and social transformation have proved, a sense of seriousness can be
tempered with the knowledge that many tools are already available - and where
they are not, the effort to create a productive new critical sensibility is well
advanced. There is also a crucial political opening within the liberal problematic
itself, in the sense that it assumes that power is most effective when it is absorbed
as truth, consented to and desired - which creates an important space for refusal.
As Colin Gordon argues, Foucault thought that the very possibility of governing was
conditional on it being credible to the governed as well as the governing. This
throws weight onto the question of how security works as a technology of
subjectivity. It is to take up Foucault's challenge, framed as a reversal of the liberal
progressive movement of being we have seen in Hegel, not to discover who or what
we are so much as to refuse who we are . Just as security rules subjectivity as both
a totalizing and individualizing blackmail and promise, it is at these levels that we
can intervene. We can critique the machinic frameworks of possibility represented
by law, policy, economic regulation, and diplomacy, while challenging the way these
institutions deploy language to draw individual subjects into their consensual web.
This suggests, at least provisionally, a dual strategy. The first asserts the space for
agency, both in challenging available possibilities for being and their larger
socioeconomic implications. Roland Bleiker formulates an idea of agency that shifts
away from the lone (male) hero overthrowing the social order in a decisive act of
rebellion to one that understands both the thickness of social power and its
"fissures," "fragmentation," and "thinness." We must, he says, "observe how an
individual may be able to escape the discursive order and influence its shifting
boundaries ... by doing so, discursive terrains of dissent all of a sudden appear
where forces of domination previously seemed invincible." Pushing beyond security
requires tactics that can work at many levels - that empower individuals to
recognize the larger social, cultural, and economic implications of the everyday
forms of desire, subjection, and discipline they encounter, to challenge and rewrite

them, and that in turn contribute to collective efforts to transform the larger
structures of being, exchange, and power that sustain (and have been sustained by)
these forms. As Derrida suggests, this is to open up aporetic possibilities that
transgress and call into question the boundaries of the self, society, and the
international that security seeks to imagine and police. The second seeks new
ethical principles based on a critique of the rigid and repressive forms of identity
that security has heretofore offered. Thus writers such as Rosalyn Diprose, William
Connolly, and Moria Gatens have sought to imagine a new ethical relationship that
thinks difference not on the basis of the same but on the basis of a dialogue with
the other that might allow space for the unknown and unfamiliar , for a "debate and
engagement with the other's law and the other's ethics" - an encounter that
involves a transformation of the self rather than the other. Thus while the sweep
and power of security must be acknowledged, it must also be refused : at the
simultaneous levels of individual identity, social order, and macroeconomic
possibility, it would entail another kind of work on "ourselves" - a political refusal of
the One, the imagination of an other that never returns to the same. It would be to
ask if there is a world after security, and what its shimmering possibilities might be.

Humans have a psychological bias towards catastrophe

scenarios prefer a focus on structural impacts.
Dietrich Fischer, Pace University, and Jurgen Brauer, Augusta State University, Georgia, Twenty Questions for Peace Economics: A Research Agenda,
Defence and Peace Economics, April 2002, http://www.aug.edu/~sbajmb/paper-DPE.PDF
Poverty and high unemployment, especially in the presence of conspicuous wealth , contribute to
frustration, social unrest, and sometimes civil war . It is easy to design an economy that produces luxuries
for a few. Far more challenging is to design an economic system that satisfies the human needs for food,
clothing, homes, education, and medical care of all. What are the characteristics of such an economy? What obstacles prevent it from
emerging, and how can they be overcome? Galtung coined the notion ofstructural violence (as opposed to direct violence) for social
conditions that cause avoidable human suffering and death, even if there is no specific actor committing
the violence. Khler and Alcock (1976) have estimated that structural violence causes about one hundred times as
many deaths each year as all international and civil wars combined . It is as if over 200 Hiroshima bombs were dropped each
year on the children of the world, but the media fail to report it because it is less dramatic than a bomb
explosion . How can we estimate the loss of life resulting from poverty and unequal income distribution?
How can we reduce it?

Their claims are not neutral or objective- academics are

corrupted by military funding and other lobbying.
Webb 9 (Dave Webb is a Professor of Engineering Modeling, Director of the 'Praxis
Centre" (a multidisciplinary research centre for the 'Study of Information Technology
to Peace, Conflict and Human Rights') and a member of the School of Applied Global
Ethics at Leeds Metropolitan University. "Securing Outer Space"; "Space Weapons:
Dream, nightmare or reality?" Routledge Critical Security Studies Series, 2009,
It appears therefore that the military industrial complex is hard at work here. The US
aerospace companies are very good lobbyists - they are constantly reminding
politicians about the number of jobs that they are generating in their constituencies
and they make large donations to both Republican and Democrat parties. They are

the sellers of the dreams of ultimate political control of space and of the Hatth in
return for billion-dollar contracts. The politicians don't know enough about physics
to question the projects in any details and nowadays there is a third partner in all
this - the universities. The academic world is increasingly involved as funding for
science and engineering research projects at univcrsirics comes increasingly to
depend on the military and aerospace companies - it is questionable as to whether
they can be considered to be neutral and to give unbiased advice to government.

Defenses are improving and the threat is

decreasing
Libicki 13
MARTIN C. LIBICKI is a Senior Management Scientist at the RAND Corporation and a
Visiting Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, Foreign Affairs, August 16, 2013,
"Don't Buy the Cyberhype: How to Prevent Cyberwars From Becoming Real Ones",
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139819/martin-c-libicki/dont-buy-thecyberhype

These days, most of Washington seems to believe that a major cyberattack on U.S.
critical infrastructure is inevitable. In March, James Clapper, U.S. director of national
intelligence, ranked cyberattacks as the greatest short-term threat to U.S. national
security. General Keith Alexander, the head of the U.S. Cyber Command, recently
characterized cyber exploitation of U.S. corporate computer systems as the
greatest transfer of wealth in world history. And in January, a report by the
Pentagons Defense Science Board argued that cyber risks should be managed with
improved defenses and deterrence, including a nuclear response in the most
extreme case.
Although the risk of a debilitating cyberattack is real, the perception of that risk
is far greater than it actually is. No person has ever died from a cyberattack,
and only one alleged cyberattack has ever crippled a piece of critical infrastructure,
causing a series of local power outages in Brazil. In fact, a major cyberattack of the
kind intelligence officials fear has not taken place in the 21 years since the Internet
became accessible to the public.
Thus, while a cyberattack could theoretically disable infrastructure or endanger
civilian lives, its effects would unlikely reach the scale U.S. officials have warned of.
The immediate and direct damage from a major cyberattack on the United States
could range anywhere from zero to tens of billions of dollars, but the latter would
require a broad outage of electric power or something of comparable damage.
Direct casualties would most likely be limited, and indirect causalities would depend
on a variety of factors such as whether the attack disabled emergency 911 dispatch
services. Even in that case, there would have to be no alternative means of
reaching first responders for such an attack to cause casualties. The indirect effects
might be greater if a cyberattack caused a large loss of confidence, particularly in
the banking system. Yet scrambled records would probably prove insufficient to
incite a run on the banks.
Officials also warn that the United States might not be able to identify the source of
a cyberattack as it happens or in its immediate aftermath. Cyberattacks have
neither fingerprints nor the smell of gunpowder, and hackers can make an intrusion
appear legitimate or as if it came from somewhere else. Iran, for example, may not
have known why its centrifuges were breaking down prematurely before its officials
read about the covert cyber-sabotage campaign against the countrys nuclear

program in The New York Times. Victims of advanced persistent threats -- extended
intrusions into organization networks for the purpose of espionage -- are often
unaware for months, or even years, that their servers have been penetrated. The
reason that such attacks go undetected is because the removal of information does
not affect the information in the system, so nothing seems amiss. The exfiltration of
information can also be easily hidden, such as in the daily flow of web traffic from
an organization.
But since everything is becoming increasingly dependent on computers, could
levels of damage impossible today become inevitable tomorrow? As it happens, all
of the trend lines -- good and bad -- in cyberspace are rising simultaneously: the
sophistication of attackers, but also that of the defenders; the salience of
cyberattacks as weapons, but also the awareness of the threat they pose; the
bandwidth available for organizing larger attacks, but also the resources to ward
them off. It is bad news that Iran is beginning to see cyberwar as a deniable means
of exploiting easy targets. And it is good news that software companies are now
rethinking the architectural features of their systems that permit such vulnerabilities
to exist in the first place.