D3.1 Nexus of cyberspace actors

Details

Abstract

The document focuses mainly on various selected actors and discusses what scholars, businesses and government think about the actors’ motivation. The provided nexus of actors in the attached table should serve as an orientation point for the reader how the actors relate to each other, what motivates them and what are their objectives in general. We took approach that should fulfil some requirements of the actors nexus completeness. However, at the same time we believe that a mere summarization of the actors and general introduction to the debate would be unsatisfactory as it would not bring anything new to a reader oriented in cyber security. Neither we wanted to cover everything, nor we decided to select the most important. We rather decided to take a novel approach and show how the link between culture, imagination, technological uncertainty and security practices merge into a perception of cyber space that can be both alarmist and critical. These two perceptions usually cannot be in the same document, however, we put them together to show the visible difference between them.

The former, alarmist, perception can be identified within a group of policy makers that tend to identify any opportunity to make progress in policy making with intention not to miss any single possibility of insecurities that should be covered by policy. However, such keen approach usually makes them blind from the consequences of exceptional politics they propose to implement. The latter, critical, approach do exactly the opposite, it deconstructs the discourse of the alarmists and provides an insight into the hidden intentions of these alarmists. One can argue that the absence of a single cyber terrorist attack does not satisfy the need for security from cyber terrorists, however, at the same time we should ask a question what the proportionate reaction on something is we do not have experience with. This dilemma is a very common one in cyber security as measurement of power in cyber space is almost impossible, which is understandably the reason why alarmist discourse is thriving.

Such dilemma also influences how cyber space is perceived from the international law perspective. Therefore, Chapter 5 seeks to explore the multifaced international law challenges faced by various actors in cyberspace.