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CYBERDEFENCE AS DEMOCRACY'S OPPORTUNITY
Special Lecture on 'Cyberdefence as Democracy's Opportunity'
The need to build an effective cyberdefence system offers both India and the United States an opportunity to make progress on a fundamental political aspiration increasing citizen participation in public affairs. This is due to the three main military characteristics of cyberwar: 1) the speed and scale of engagement, 2) the structure of cyberbattle, and 3) and the type of soldier needed for a cyberarmy.
Speed and scale of engagement : The high speed and varying scale of military engagement in cyberwar is breathtaking to imagine. Battles can be started and stopped, lost and won, in times that range between seconds and dozens of hours — all the while expanding and shrinking by orders of magnitude. A defensive cyberarmy may have to be mobilized, deployed, and then demobilized on the same time-scale. Speed and scale dictate that such a cyberarmy may have to be quite large for quite short periods of time. A fulltime profesional army will neither be sufficient nor affordable. Electronically summoned adult civilians, instantaneously drafted for military service will have to be an important part of an effective cyberdefense system. Any alternative is likely to result either in a militarized society, an ineffective cyberdefense, or both.
Structure of battle: The battles of a conventional physical war are connected by an approximate, visible, and easily understood hierarchy of political and military objectives. The logical connection between asking General Jacob to take Dacca by December 17 and ordering Havaldar-Major Hamid to capture a hill a mile
away is easily understood. As a result, civilian control of the military is largely limited to high-level orders about the conduct of the war as a whole.
Not so with cyberwar. A cyberwar is a set of heterogeneous cyberbattles, with the battles only loosely connected to one another, if at all. Each battle will probably have its own independent political objective. Therefore, civilian control of the military will have to extend to control at the level of the battle. Because of the number of independent battles that may be going on at any given moment, the new civilian control of the military will require many more political decision-makers than conventional war does.
This fundamental feature of democracy requires political debate grounded in deeply competing domestic political interests and ideologies. But the number of debates and the speed and the secrecy with which they have to be conducted make a conventional legislative proceeding impractical. Electronically summoned adult citizens, instantaneously drafted for political service into a mini-legislature, will have to be an important part of an effective debate-based system for civilian control of cyberdefense operations. Any alternative is likely to damage democracy, produce an ineffective cyberdefense system, or both.
Type of soldier: The soldier of a cyberarmy will most be likely be summoned by an email, and will have to fight the war at her desk, quite possibly at home. Boot camp for such a soldier will consist of extended technical education and training. No society can afford such a permanent cyberarmy — its members will have to be drawn from the private sector for brief periods of time. Because of the necessarily brief tenure of every soldier, many or even most will have to receive technical education sufficient to serve in the cyberarmy.
Taking advantage of these characteristics requires ingenuity in political engineering. An effective cyberdefence system can use political debate as a resource to be exploited rather than as a problem to be contained. To do this, we will have to create innovative institutions. One possible political design element is a Citizen Panel for Action and Deliberation (CPAD) that is radical yet feasible — again, in both India and the United States.
A CPAD is a small group (say 20 -50 citizens) convened by random assignment, and it can have one of two functions: (1) it can function as a legislature with a limited agenda — it can approve or disapprove limited cyber-military operations, create and revise rules of engagement, and other aspects of civilian control of the military; (2) it can be convened as a cyber-platoon, to carry out limited cyber-military operations approved by other CPADs. As a body for political decision-making, such a citizen-composed panel will be responsible and secure. As the military kernel of a cyberdefence system, a different incarnation of such a group can be locally knowledgeable, nimble, inexpensive, and rapidly deployed.
Developing such a dual-purpose institution requires enough public education that it will have enormous positive economic consequences as well, for we will now have a much-better-educated citizenry.
In war, the expedient frequently trumps the democratic. Rarely has the Executive been able to obtain legitimate political approval for either war or the additional national security apparatus it spawns. This is true whether the Executive is a creature of Parliament or an independent branch of Government — that is to say, in both India and America. Cyberwar can be different. The talk shows how and why.
Bio: R. Bhaskar
Bhaskar's Research intersts currently include the design of public institutions and the political aspects of cyberdefence and cyberwar. His research has been published in Artificial Intelligence, Bulletin of the Materials Research Society, Cognitive Science, Economic Times of India, Instructional Science and the Astrophysical Journal. He has served as a Technical Advisor at the Federal Trade Commission, where he helped develop and inform antitrust policy, and as a scientist at the artificial intelligence laboratory at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Centre in Yorktown Heights , New York Bhaskar has a Bachelor's degree in mechanical Engineering from the National Institute of Engineering , a Ph.D. in Systems Sciences from Camegie -Mellon University , and a JD from the Yale Law School.
R. Bhaskar is an independent scholar based in Cambridge Massachusetts. His email address is: rbhaskar at alumni. cmu. edu
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