Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/122908
C CyBer SecURIty Joshua P. samac is an energy security expert with the Atlantic council of canada and recently completed an mA in International Relations at the University of Windsor. dIstRIbUted seCURItY In the CYbeR eCosYstem Named to the order of ontario in January, ron deibert, a professor of political science and director of the citizen Lab at the munk School of Global Affairs, is a leading voice on digital technology, advising governments and international organizations about issues related to cyber security. he spoke with Joshua P. Samac. Q In one of your recent publications, you mention that cyber security discussions lack first order conceptualization of how cyber space as a global medium of open and distributed communication is in Canada's interest. There really is no conception of what cyber space actually is, is there? No, and I would say that, going further, there is no appreciation of the political philosophy that underlines what it is that we are securing in the first place. There is a tendency when dealing with technological issues, in general, to think of technical functional solutions (if only we had a fix for this hole all would be fine) and you can see this in many of the approaches to cyber security. Going further, there is an instinct, once security is involved or when something is securitized – we tend to default onto the Realist tradition and all that it entails. Q Realism very much espouses those things we would most closely associate with the security dimension of international politics. I think that in this space, the tendency toward both the technical functional solution and the realist paradigm mentioned above might be counterproductive to the environment that we want to create and that we value in the first place. Thinking those through is really important, because you can see tendencies in this and other liberal democratic countries to throw the baby 36 APRIL/mAy 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com out with the bathwater, so to speak. In doing so, we legitimize policies and practices that we criticize. Q Such as? Lawful access, to name but one. Bill C-30, before it was shelved, would have provided law enforcement with extraordinary powers and would have imposed a huge burden on the private sector to police the Internet without much protection for civil liberties or privacy. If we are doing this sort of thing to secure cyber space, we are losing sight of what we are securing in the first place and undercutting the foundation of our liberal democratic society. Q So we may be a liberal democratic society in the physical world but by conceptualizing cyber space through this realist paradigm dominated by the need to secure things and counterbalance our enemies, we are losing sight of our liberal democratic foundations? Exactly. Most people would agree that, at a fundamental level, we should have an open communications environment that is highly distributed. This means that we can all access it and communicate with each other in an unfettered manner. This is the democratization of communication and access to information. If we lose sight of this to control the bad things that go along with it, then we lose sight of what's valuable about it in the first place.