 The Global Cyber Threat Environment, Module 2, Cyber Deterrence and the International System of Sovereignty. Objectives, once you have completed the readings, lecture, activity and assessment, you will be able to articulate how Joseph Nye conceptualizes the role of soft power in deterring cyber attacks. How the Internet has created tensions within the Westphalian System. Welcome to the Global Cyber Threat Environment, Module 2. In his book, Cyber Warfare, Cyber Security Expert and Author Paul Rosenweig states that non-state actors in cyberspace have begun a challenge to the hegemony of nation states that have been the foundation for international relations since the Peace of Westphalia. In this statement, Rosenweig is referring to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which marked the end of the Thirty Years War, a war that killed nearly 30% of the German population. One of the primary causes of the war was the issue of religious autonomy within European Principalities, and that the treaty signatories agreed to the principle that whoever rules the territory determines the religion. The treaty was a turning point as it helped to create our modern system of state sovereignty. It effectively cemented the territorial integrity and legal equality of all nation states and prohibited the interference of one state into the eternal affairs of another. You may be wondering how the Treaty of Westphalia connects to the topic of this course. Consider this. The Internet was designed for information to be free-flowing, that is, to cross national boundaries without any consideration to a state's ideology or political organization. John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, captured this idea in the 1996 paper, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. He states in part, governments of the industrial world, you have no sovereignty where we gather. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. As Internet technology spread around the globe, authoritarian countries like China and Russia grudgingly accepted this concept but quickly realized that the free flow of information could have negative consequences for their government's survival. Eventually, many authoritarian governments protested the Internet's open design, citing their right to sovereignty that the Treaty of Westphalia had established. They argued that they had a right to control and filter information crossing their borders. Many governments have also discovered a military domain to Cyberspace and are devoting enormous resources to leverage it offensively. Damien Ma of the Pulse Institute and an adjunct lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management noted in an article in the magazine Foreign Policy, Cyberspace is no longer the independent space of the cyber libertarians. It is now a military domain. And when a freewheeling place like the Internet militarizes, the Internet's laissez-faire culture of privacy, anonymity, and free expression inevitably comes into conflict with military priorities of security and protocol. In other words, the Internet has given us incredible access to information around the world, but it has also created a new domain of warfare. We seem to have reached a point where cyber technology is challenging the notion of state sovereignty held sacrosanct for nearly 400 years, yet we have not updated our sovereignty paradigm to accommodate this new technology. In addition, we need to upgrade our deterrent system in dealing with cyber weapons. During the Cold War, the United States and Russia reached a mutual understanding concerning the use of nuclear weapons, creating a system of deterrence called mutually assured destruction. Simply put, this understanding was that if one side initiated a nuclear attack, the defender nation with a second strike capability would launch its own nuclear arsenal to completely destroy the aggressor. As macabre as this technique may seem, the logic was successful, as the world made it through the Cold War without a nuclear weapon being fired. Until at the dawn of the cyber age, we lack any system of cyber deterrence similar to that of nuclear weapons use. Simply consider the Russian interference and the 2016 US presidential election. The US intelligence community's report, background to assessing Russian activities and intentions in recent US elections, noted that the purpose of Russian interference was to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency, among other things. How does one deter this type of interference from a nation state rival like Russia? We could use a tit for tat approach, similar to that used in the era of Cold War espionage. Russian President Putin's primary objective is to remain in power. So in return for his own information operations attacks during the 2016 election, we might wage an information operations campaign against his rule. This deterrent scenario incorporates what Joseph Nye, a Harvard University professor, refers to as Cyber Soft Power. In one of this module's readings, Nye relates another example of how soft power has been used for deterrence. In this example, the Chinese government incited its citizens to disrupt Japanese-based websites in reaction to an unfavorable diplomatic stand taken by the Japanese government. Using soft power strategies for cyber deterrence contrasts with scenarios using cyber hard power, such as cyber-enabled kinetic attacks to destroy servers or computer-enabled critical infrastructure systems. The road to developing a reliable method of cyber deterrence is likely to be a long one. The problem, although arguably not as dangerous as deterring nuclear attacks during the Cold War, is in many ways much more complicated. Quiz question one, true or false? China and Russia would argue that the Westphalian system of state sovereignty allows for information on the worldwide web to flow unimpeded into their countries. A, true, B, false. The answer is false. Quiz question two, according to Nye's Cyber Power article, which of the following is not a reason why smaller actors have more capacity to exercise hard and soft power in cyberspace than in many more traditional domains of world politics? A, the low price of entry. B, anonymity. C, access to a highly trained technological workforce. D, asymmetries in vulnerability. The answer is C, access to a highly trained technological workforce. Activity in February 2018, special counsel Robert Mueller released a 37-page indictment against several individuals involved in supporting the Russian influence campaign against the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Do you think that Nye's model would have deterred the individuals identified in Mueller's indictment? If so, why? If not, can you articulate a deterrence model that may be more effective in the future?