Information Warfare in the Age of Cyber Conflict

This book examines the shape, sources and dangers of information warfare (IW) as it pertains to military, diplomatic and civilian stakeholders.

This book examines the shape, sources and dangers of information warfare (IW) as it pertains to military, diplomatic and civilian stakeholders.

Cyber warfare and information warfare are different beasts. Both concern information, but where the former does so exclusively in its digitized and operationalized form, the latter does so in a much broader sense: with IW, information itself is the weapon. The present work aims to help scholars, analysts and policymakers understand IW within the context of cyber conflict. Specifically, the chapters in the volume address the shape of influence campaigns waged across digital infrastructure and in the psychology of democratic populations in recent years by belligerent state actors, from the Russian Federation to the Islamic Republic of Iran. In marshalling evidence on the shape and evolution of IW as a broad-scoped phenomenon aimed at societies writ large, the authors in this book present timely empirical investigations into the gl obal landscape of influence operations, legal and strategic analyses of their role in international politics, and insightful examinations of the potential for democratic process to overcome pervasive foreign manipulation.

This book will be of much interest to students of cybersecurity, national security, strategic studies, defence studies and International Relations in general.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

1. Introduction Christopher Whyte, Trevor Thrall and Brian Mazanec Part I: The nature, history and correlates of information warfare in the age of cyber conflict 2. The convergence of information warfare Martin C. Libicki 3. A brief history of fake: Surveying Russian disinformation from the Russian empire through the cold war to the present Aaron F. Brantly 4. The Ideological battlefield: China's approach to political warfare and propaganda in an age of cyber conflict Elsa B. Kania 5. Cyber Conflict at the intersection of information operations: Cyber-enabled information operations 2000-2016 Colin Foote, Ryan C. Maness, Benjamin Jensen and Brandon Valeriano Part II: (Cyber-enabled) Information at war 6. Bear market? Grizzly steppe and the American marketplace of ideas A. Trevor Thrall and Andrew Armstrong 7. Commanding the trend: Social media as information warfare Lt Col Jarred Prier 8. Cyber by a different logic: Using an information warfare kill chain to understand cyber-enabled influence operations Christopher Whyte and Ugochukwu Etudo 9. Cyber-enabled information warfare and influence operations: A revolution in technique? Miguel Alberto Gomez Part III: Building resilience: Questions of legality, diplomacy and society 10. Might or Byte(s): On the safeguarding of democracy in the digital age Christopher Colligan 11. On the organization of the U.S. Government for responding to adversarial information warfare and influence operations Herbert Lin 12. Virtual disenfranchisement: Cyber election meddling in the grey zones of international law Michael Schmitt 13. Stigmatizing cyber and information warfare: Mission impossible? Brian Mazanec and Patricia Shamai Part IV: The fluid shape of modern information warfare 14. How deep the rabbit hole goes: Escalation, deterrence and the 'deeper' challenges of information warfare in the age of the internet Christopher Whyte