In obscura espionage definition plus#
In obscura espionage definition professional#

A large literature has critically examined the securitization of cyberspace (e.g., Barnard-Wills & Ashenden, 2012 Bendrath, 2001 Lee & Rid, 2014 Zajko, 2015), highlighting that cybersecurity threats are the contingent result of particular communications to a receptive audience.

In obscura espionage definition plus#

Hansen and Nissenbaum ( 2009) have argued influentially that cybersecurity, as an emerging discourse in international security, is the product of a technical computer security discourse plus securitization: the framing of international political issues as problems of security (Buzan, Waever, & Wilde, 1997). It argues that a foundational problem in cybersecurity is the task of drawing a clear dividing line between legitimate and malicious activity in an environment swamped with data, where identical tools and tactics are used for different ends, and where social and economic structures compound technical similarities. This section locates the article in existing cybersecurity theory in International Relations (IR) scholarship. Legitimate and malicious activity in cyberspace Consequently, the deepest difficulty in maintaining the legitimate/malicious binary–and therefore constructing a stable foundation for cybersecurity itself–is not the range of technological, social, and economic pressures explicitly recognized by cybersecurity experts, but their implicit embrace of cyber-noir. To paraphrase a neat description of film noir leads, cybersecurity experts see themselves as “seeming black and then seeming white, and being both all along” (Luhr, 2012, p. These sections trace noir influences on images and names circulating in these discourses, arguing that these influences create and sustain a morally ambiguous expert identity, which in turn perpetuates practices that blur the legitimate/malicious boundary. The third and fourth sections analyze two aspects of cybersecurity expert discourses: visual styles and naming conventions. The second section provides the theoretical basis for the concept of cyber-noir, drawing on film studies, critical security studies, and wider postmodern thought, including that of Baudrillard, to justify the article’s focus on popular culture influences on cybersecurity such as noir, science fiction, and cyber-punk. The first section argues that distinct cybersecurities noted by securitization scholars share a common distinction between legitimate and malicious activity, and that cybersecurity experts work to maintain this distinction against technological, economic, and social factors that threaten to undermine it. The article is structured in four sections.

In obscura espionage definition professional#

It argues that the concept of cyber-noir helps explain the persistence of expert practices that blur legal, moral, and professional lines between legitimate and malicious activity in cyberspace. Unlike other post-structuralist works in security studies, which often prioritize readings of popular culture artefacts as political texts, this article instead focuses on the appearance of popular culture elements in specific expert practices. It approaches this interaction from a post-structural perspective, understanding discourses not as collections of texts produced by already fixed actors, but as defining and constraining the identities of those actors, and through discursive overlaps and tensions generating meaning and providing conditions of possibility for action. This article puts forward the concept of cyber-noir to capture the interaction between two discourses: an expert discourse of cybersecurity and a wider noir discourse circulating primarily in popular culture artefacts such as films, books, and television series. Is it, as a (relatively) viral video of Michael Sulmeyer, former Director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Cybersecurity Project, put it, just an effort to conjure up “cybersecurity sex appeal” (Sulmeyer, 2016)? Or is there something else going on–something more fundamental to cybersecurity itself, and more theoretically interesting? It takes the branding of the cybersecurity industry seriously, asking why these companies seek to portray liminality, transgression, and tantalizing opacity. These purveyors of what might be called “cyber-noir”–defined as the incorporation of noir aesthetics and themes into expert cybersecurity discourses–are often dismissed in International Relations (IR) as a mere sideshow, a footnote to more comfortable state-based dynamics. Many emerging companies in the cybersecurity industry deliberately play on the popular perception of cybersecurity as a nether region, a gloomy underworld in which the good guys must resort to unconventional tactics to keep at bay a motley group of threats to the digital safety of unsuspecting individuals, businesses, and governments.