Analysis of security issues is inherently problematical, for a number of reasons. Although the term “security” is widely used, it is broad and open-ended. The meaning of security is thus open to a variety of different interpretations and is often contested. In a general sense, security –being secure-implies the absence of threats or a lack of vulnerability. The oxford English dictionary, for example, defines security as being untroubled by danger or fear, safe against attack, or the safety of a state company, etc., against espionage, theft or other danger. Security is therefore the general term applicable to individuals or any social group and relating to a wide range of issues – from an individual’s personal or psychological security, to a state’s security against external attack, to humanity’s security, from global threats such as climate change. In international politics, however, security has come to have a narrower and more specific meaning centred on war on war and peace, and the protection of the territorial integrity and political independence of the nation-state from the threat or use of violent force.
Writing during the Second World war, the American commentator Walter Lippman described security as the extent to which nation is not a danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes to avoid war and is able, if challenged, to maintain them by victory in war, this understanding of the term security become widespread in international politics in the wake of the Second World War and in the or narrow definition of security,[1] thus focuses on the military security of states, but has an important political dimension in that it also relates to the ability of states to maintain their freedoms, independence and values (such as democracy).
Critics of the traditional definition of security argue that invasion war and violent coercion are not the only potential threats to states’ security or necessarily the most serious or pressing security problems. A wide range of non – military problems – dependence on foreign economic resources (such as oil or finance), environmental degradation and mass migration, transnational organized crime and pandemic diseases such as HIV/AIDS – may threaten the security of states and their citizens. Such critics argue for the broadening of the concept to include “soft” security challenges or a range of non military “sectors”, the danger with this logic is that security may come to include virtually all international problems and in so doing arguable becomes so broad as to be meaningless. In the end, what constitutes security or threat to security is subjective – it depends on perception of which communities values and institutional matter, and the treats to those communities values and institutions. Security therefore is not something that can be objectively defined or of which there is likely to be an agreed definition.[2]
The subjective nature of security points to another important issue: how and why do individuals or communities define some issues or problems (but not others) as security problems of threats? The process has been described as securitization and involves the definition issues as an existential threat requiring extraordinary or emergency measures above and beyond the bounds of normal day-to-day politics[3]. Since the early 1990s we have seen the securitization wide range of non-military issues including international economic relations, global environmental problems, mass migration, transnational organized crime and pandemic diseases, with governments and international organizations defining these problems as threats to security and seeking to mobilize action and resources on this basis. The nature and extent of the security threat posed by these problems and how states should respond to them however remain contentious.
National security
The need to redefine national security is not a new phenomenon. Each significant change in the geopolitical environment has brought with it a call for redefinition. Examples include the immediate post-Vietnam War era and the immediate post-Cold War era. This present era of globalization is no different with its significant set of new opportunities and challenges. National and international infrastructures and economies are becoming more interdependent and interlinked by increasingly efficient and converging, but vulnerable, telecommunications and computer systems. International economic competitiveness is requiring government policymakers to adapt new economic policies and industry leaders to restructure and consolidate. Social, economic and environmental problems are worsening in many parts of the world. And diffuse and asymmetrical nuclear, biological, chemical, cyber, and terrorist threats are emerging at the same time that distinctions between what is domestic and what is foreign are blurring. [4]
Debates to define national security and national interest have been going on between and among policymakers, strategists, and scholars since the mid-1950s. There is no universal agreement on even theoretical definitions of these concepts National Security The earliest formulation of the concept of national security is attributed to Walter Lippmann who wrote in 1942: “A nation is secure to the extent to which it is not in danger of having to sacrifice core values, if it wishes to avoid war, and is able, if challenged, to maintain them in victory in such a war.” [5] Within a decade after this formulation, and concurrent with the beginning of the Cold War, national security became the focus of foreign policy analysts. In his classic 1952 essay, Arnold Wolfers described it as “an ambiguous symbol.” Indeed, when the National Security Act had been enacted five years earlier to create an organizational framework for the federal government to integrate domestic, foreign, and military policies related to national security, it was notably silent with respect to what national security meant. While discussion of national security during and through the Cold War era was conducted primarily in terms of national defense and foreign policy, international economics was added to the national security agenda in the 1970s. Subsequently, some strategic analysts “inappropriately argued that economic security the only crucial security dimension.” [6] In the late 1980s with the demise of the Soviet empire and the Soviet state, proposals were made to expand the agenda to include natural resources, the environment, demographics, human rights, drug traffic, epidemics, crime, and social injustice. Responding to these proposals, Theodore Sorensen, former Special Counsel to President Kennedy, said that a narrow, not broad, definition of national security is required, and suggested that it could be achieved by building a bipartisan consensus around a very limited number of basic national security goals, while leaving room for partisan disagreement on their implementation. Despite the lack of an agreed definition, “national security” has been—and is being—applied in a number of public policy venues.
Wolfers’1952 article on national security also identified national interest as a related vague concept that sought to explain a nation’s behavior in terms of its perception of its national interest at a particular point in time. When his essay was published, the debate on what constitutes the national interest was becoming polarized between the realists and the moralists (later called idealists). Over the years, opponents have criticized national interest-based foreign policy in terms of the complexity of defining the means and the ends of such a policy, of the problem of aggregating special interests into a national interest, and of whether it is retroactively read into public policies in which it may have played a marginal role or no role at all.[7] Hans Morgenthau, an early and influential advocate of the realist school, argued that the point of departure of the foreign policy of any country should be the concept of national interest as defined in terms of power.[8] Through the years, Morgenthau’s power-based formulation of the national interest has been challenged, but it has not been effectively refuted. Indeed, a year before she was named as the National Security Adviser in the present Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice strongly argued that American foreign policy in a Republican administration should refocus the United States on the national interest and the pursuit of key priorities. Further, “Power matters, both the exercise of power by the United States and the ability of others to exercise it.”[9] Interestingly, a comprehensive study of definitions of national interest in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1980s concluded that “there is no single national interest” and, in so doing, reaffirmed the frequently expressed view that because the national interest of a nation is to satisfy its national needs, there are as many national interests as there are national needs.[10]
The Nation’s IT infrastructure has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last decade. Explosive growth in the use of networks to connect various IT systems has made it relatively easy to obtain information, to communicate, and to control these systems across great distances. Because of the tremendous productivity gains and new capabilities enabled by these networked systems, they have been incorporated into a vast number of civilian applications, including education, commerce, science and engineering, and entertainment. They have also been incorporated into virtually every sector of the Nation’s critical infrastructure – including communications, utilities, finance, transportation, law enforcement, and defense. Indeed, these sectors are now critically reliant on the underlying IT infrastructure. At the same time, this revolution in connectivity has also increased the potential of those who would do harm, giving them the capability to do so from afar while armed with only a computer and the knowledge needed to identify and exploit vulnerabilities. Today, it is possible for a malicious agent to penetrate millions of computers around the world in a matter of minutes, exploiting those machines to attack the Nation’s critical infrastructure, penetrate sensitive systems, or steal valuable data.
The growth in the number of attacks matches the tremendous growth in connectivity, and dealing with these attacks now costs the Nation billions of dollars annually. Moreover, we are rapidly losing ground to those who do harm, as is indicated by the steadily mounting numbers of compromised networks and resulting financial losses. Beyond economic repercussions, the risks to our Nation’s security are clear. In addition to the potential for attacks on critical targets within our borders, our national defense systems are at risk as well, because the military increasingly relies on ubiquitous communication and the networks that support it.[11]
The world is also less safe in other ways according to many observers alongside the classic conception of security – safety from physical attack or coercion by treat of attack - is a broader conception of safety from economic catastrophe, human rights threats, environmental damage, health disaster, etc. Using this conception, security is threatened in many ways, including the side effects from progress in development, globalization, and communications.[12]
The Global Information Grid (GIG), which is projected to cost as much as $100 billion and is intended to improve military communications by linking weapons, intelligence, and military personnel to each other, represents one such critical network. Since military networks interconnect with those in the civilian sector or use similar hardware or software, they are susceptible to any vulnerability in these other networks or technologies. Thus cyber security in the civilian and military sectors is intrinsically linked. Although the large costs associated with cyber insecurity have only recently become manifest, the Nation’s cyber security problems have been building for many years and will plague us for many years to come. They derive from a decades-long failure to develop the security protocols and practices needed to protect the Nation’s IT infrastructure, and to adequately train and grow the numbers of experts needed to employ those mechanisms effectively. The short term patches and fixes that are deployed today can be useful in response to isolated vulnerabilities, but they do not adequately address the core problems. Rather, fundamental, long-term research is required to develop entirely new approaches to cyber security. It is imperative that we take action before the situation worsens and the cost of inaction becomes even greater. [13]
Cyber security was first used by computer scientists in the early 1990‟s to underline a series of insecurities related to networked computers, but it moved beyond a mere technical conception of computer security when proponents urged that threats arising from digital technologies could have devastating societal effects[14].
The Copenhagen School argues that security is a speech act that securitizes, that is constitutes one or more referent objects, historically the nation or the state, as threatened to their physical or ideational survival and therefore in urgent need of protection, A New Framework for Analysis from 1998, there is no need to theorize cyber security as a distinct sector akin to the military, the political, the environmental, the societal, the economic and the religious ones
Copenhagen School made this assessment: cyber security is successfully securitized as evidenced by such institutional developments as the establishment of the Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection by President Clinton in 1996, the prominent location of cyber security within the Department of Homeland Security, President Bush‟s formulation of The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace in 2003, and the creation of a NATO backed cyber defense centre in Estonia in 2008.[15]
[1] Barry Buzan ,et al. , Security. A New Framework for Analysis , 1998, p. 25
[2] Cottey Andrew, security in the new Europe, 2007, p 6-7
[3] Barry Buzan ,et al. , Security. A New Framework for Analysis , 1998, p. 25
[4] Jack Oslund, Security in the Information Age: New Challenges, New Strategies Joint Economic Committee United States Congress May 2002, p 89
[5] Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy (Boston: Little Brown and Com pany, 1943) p.51.
[6] Robert Mandel, The Changing Face of National Security: A Conceptual Analysis (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1994), p.37.
[7] Fred A. Sondermann, “The Concept of the National Interest,” Orbis 21 (Spring 1977).
[8] Hans Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1951)
[9] Condoleezza Rice, “Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs 79 (January/February 2000), pp. 46-47.
[10] Morton A. Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964), p. 151.
[11] Report To the president, Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization, President’s Information Technology, Advisory Committee, Feb 2005 p 2.
[12] Asian Journal of political science Volume 11 Number 2 (December 2003) national end international security: Theory then, theory now, Patrick M. Morgan p.59
[13] Report To the president, Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization, President’s Information Technology, Advisory Committee, Feb 2005 p 3
[14] Nissenbaum, Helen. 2005. “Where computer security meets national security.” Ethics and Information Technology 7 (2): 61-73.
[15] Hansen Lene and Helen Nissenbaum Digital Disaster, Cyber Security and the Copenhagen School1 Dec 2009, p2
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