Citizen Lab Fellow Jon Penney wrote a piece for the Canadian International Council on the outsourcing of cyberwar, and the strategies that fail to adequately address an emerging threat to cyber-security: the role of non-state actors.
See below for an excerpt:
Among certain national-security and public-policy circles, there is a growing trend to approach the challenges of cyber-security and cyber-war through the lens of the Cold War. While Cold War experiences can be useful to understand recent developments like the “militarization” of cyberspace, adopting Cold War strategies for cyber-security may do more harm than good for many reasons, not the least of which is that such a framework puts at risk Internet freedom – a value recognized at last year’s G8 summit – as it is much easier for governments, both foreign and domestic, to justify Internet censorship and citizen surveillance during times of war.
But Cold War strategies may also pose a risk to security because, in focusing on state-led conduct or state-on-state cyber-activity and conflicts, they fail to adequately address an emerging threat to cyber-security: the role of non-state actors.
For the full article, see here.