December 14 2018 will be remembered for striking news about a new bill submitted to Russia’s State Duma: "On amendments to some legislative acts of the Russian Federation." Behind the meaningless title there are a bunch of amendments to the laws 126-FZ "On communications," and 149-FZ "On information." According to the...
Next week comes the UN Internet Governance Forum, and alongside it, the French government’s noble project of a Paris Peace Forum. The conjunction of these events has led to a proliferation of cyber norms declarations. As nice as all these calls for good behavior in cyberspace are, they inspire a sense of...
At the beginning of October, the Observer Research Foundation conducted the 5th CyFy Conference on technology, security and society in New Delhi. The composition of speakers invited to the panels signaled that India is more willing to hear from the western world than to promote its own agenda. However, this...
“Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.” ― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms Most liberal internationalists, particularly in the United States, are thoroughly committed to the idea that the development of cyber norms is the key to resolving inter-state conflicts in cyberspace. This is the...
In Chinese online discussions, many people are using the expression “one sword throat-slashing strike.” [一剑封喉] This forbidding term refers to the United States’ seven-year export ban on China’s second-largest telecom supplier, ZTE, which threatens its very existence and has put the company “in a state of shock.” In the Chinese...
At the International Studies Association convention in San Francisco, at an especially interesting panel on cybersecurity, we were privileged to hear excerpts from a forthcoming book by Michael Warner, Historian for the United States Cyber Command, and John Childress. Warner examined the last 20 years of U.S. Russia relationships in...
What's going on in China? I was invited there for a series of lectures at Beijing’s Communication University of China (CUC) during the week of March 18. Thanks to Professor Xu Peixi, who organized the tour, I got a chance to meet most of the academics, researchers and policy analysts...
There is a constant drumbeat of Russian threat stories these days, but none is more important to Internet governance than the legal battle between Kaspersky Labs and the United States. It highlights the dangers of nation-states inserting themselves into cybersecurity governance, and shows why the alignment of cybersecurity with nation...
Probably few people involved with the Internet, either as users or suppliers, have ever heard of the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation (WGEC). In fact, on January 31 this United Nations-based working group with grand ambitions for making “global public policy” for the Internet terminated its activities without accomplishing anything....
The cyber norm panel that took place in early February at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sheds light on how “cyber norms” came about. States’ negotiations over international cybersecurity strategy evolved from focusing on 'control of weaponization of information technology' to 'managing states’ behavior through cyber norms'. Moreover, it...
“In characteristically rigorous fashion, Mueller’s outstanding book punctures the alarmist myth of Internet fragmentation and helps us to understand what is really at stake as nations and other groups vie for power over the Internet.”
