The Hacked World Order: How Nations Fight, Trade, Maneuver, and Manipulate in the Digital Age

by Adam Segal

Overview

For more than three hundred years, the world wrestled with conflicts that arose between nation-states. Nation-states wielded military force, financial pressure, and diplomatic persuasion to create "world order." Even after the end of the Cold War, the elements comprising world order remained essentially unchanged.

But 2012 marked a transformation in geopolitics and the tactics of both the established powers and smaller entities looking to challenge the international community. That year, the US government revealed its involvement in Operation "Olympic Games," a mission aimed at disrupting the Iranian nuclear program through cyberattacks; Russia and China conducted massive cyber-espionage operations; and the world split over the governance of the Internet. Cyberspace became a battlefield.

Cyber conflict is hard to track, often delivered by proxies, and has outcomes that are hard to gauge. It demands that the rules of engagement be completely reworked and all the old niceties of diplomacy be recast. Many of the critical resources of statecraft are now in the hands of the private sector, giant technology companies in particular. In this new world order, cybersecurity expert Adam Segal reveals, power has been well and truly hacked.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610394161
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	02/23/2016
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Adam Segal is the Ira A Lipman Chair in Emerging Technologies and National Security and Director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, Economist, Foreign Policy, Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs, among others.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Hacked World Order 1

Chapter 2 The Anatomy of Cyber Power 31

Chapter 3 Guardians of Peace, Little Green Men, Guccifer 2.0, and the Electronic Armies of the Future 57

Chapter 4 Breaking Things and the Search for Order 97

Chapter 5 Everybody Spies 135

Chapter 6 The Battle over Data: Security, Privacy, and Trade Power 171

Chapter 7 Let Slip the Twitter Followers of War: Information, Ideas, and Legitimacy 207

Chapter 8 Geopolitics Strikes Back: Nation-States and the Politics of Internet Governance 237

Chapter 9 After Pax Digital Americana 263

Afterword 287

Acknowledgments 293

Notes 297

Index 355

Editorial Reviews

"[Adam Segal] gives us plenty of reasons to wonder how long global powers will keep from going 'nuclear' in cyberspace."—Wall Street Journal

"Segal examines numerous instances of cyberwar, some of which may come as news to readers...Netizens and white-hat programmers will be familiar with Segal's arguments, but most policymakers will not—and they deserve wide discussion."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

02/15/2016
Segal (director, Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program, Council on Foreign Relations) suggests that a new era in online espionage and cyberwarfare began in the events from June 2012 through June 2013. The litmus for the watershed moment was newspaper leaks of the Stuxnet hack and the ensuing cyberresponse from Iran in retaliation. Stuxnet was unprecedented in scale and ambition; it represented a new kind of espionage by the United States and allies to subvert Iranian nuclear development. To call Stuxnet an online hack, however, would be a gross understatement—the operation involved U.S. cyberintelligence, with state-sponsored accomplices in Israel, to take down nuclear centrifuge equipment. Segal explores the complexities of a new world order, one in which wars are fought in cyberspace and old tools of diplomacy are woefully underdeveloped to respond to conflicts in the uncharted domain. Segal proposes solutions that lawmakers should take up, such as codes of conduct for cybersurveillance. VERDICT Readers who enjoy technology policy investigations will find this timely work particularly engaging.—Jim Hahn, Univ. Lib., Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

Library Journal

2015-12-21
The director of the Council of Foreign Relations' cyberspace policy program warns that the days of the open Internet may be closing as the medium becomes increasingly lawless. The world's nations have explored ways to leverage cyberspace since before there even was a cyberspace, but, as Segal (Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge, 2010, etc.) writes, the period from June 2012 to June 2013 might well be reckoned Year Zero in the battle to control cyberspace. In that period, those nation-states "visibly reasserted their control over the flow of data and information in search of power, wealth, and influence"—abandoning, in short, any utopian idea of the Internet as a vehicle to make the world a more prosperous place. More to the point, that time also saw the quickening of digital warfare against Iran, and specifically its nuclear program, with the development of the Stuxnet worm, one of whose stated aims was to "mess with Iran's best scientific minds" and "make them feel like they were stupid." A concurrent development was the reshaping of the old divisions between the public and private spheres. Although e-commerce is a private matter by near definition, it's protected by the state, while the private sector controls the communication networks over which most Internet traffic passes, government communications included. In dry but precise prose, Segal examines numerous instances of cyberwar, some of which may come as news to readers—e.g., the digital skirmish fought between Russia and Estonia over a military memorial in 2007 and the sophisticated social media campaigns carried out by the Islamic State, blending "brutality and barbarism" with the most up-to-date software. The author also worries about the prospect of a fragmented, contested Internet beset by endless hacker attacks from Russia and China and that will be markedly less free than the one we are accustomed to. Netizens and white-hat programmers will be familiar with Segal's arguments, but most policymakers will not—and they deserve wide discussion.

Kirkus Reviews