China in the U.S. Annual Threat Assessment

News agencies have been reporting widely on the content of the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment, delivered Thursday by Dennis Blair (director of U.S. national intelligence) and peppered with language that hearkens back to the Bush era (of a whole four weeks ago, but, still, anyone else tired of references to the U.S. as the “Homeland”?). News stories have focused on the primacy given to the economic crisis in the report and the analysis of threats in the Middle East and what the report calls an “arc of instabilty” from South Asia through the Middle East. However, the report also contains several pages on China specifically (pp. 22-23), as well as mentions of China’s impact in Africa (pp. 34-5), its role in cyber attacks (p. 39), and Chinese environmental security (p. 45). The full report is available at the website of the Director of National Intelligence. Below are excerpts of the included material on China. From the section on China: We judge China’s international behavior is driven by a combination of domestic priorities, primarily maintaining economic prosperity and domestic stability, and a longstanding ambition to see China play the role of a great power in East Asia and globally. Chinese leaders view preserving domestic stability as one of their most important internal security challenges. Their greatest concerns are separatist unrest and the possibility that local protests could merge into a coordinated national movement demanding fundamental political reforms or an end to Party rule. Security forces move quickly and sometimes forcefully to end demonstrations. The March 2008 protests in Tibet highlighted the danger of separatist unrest and prompted Beijing to deploy paramilitary and military assets to end the demonstrations

The shape of things to come: museums in the technological landscape

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Analyzing the Role of the State in the Promotion of the Information Revolution

This paper analyzes the relationship between effective state intervention and Information Communications Technology (ICT) dissemination. I theorize that investment in ICT leads to benefits for all firms; without government intervention and incentives, firms will have little reason to invest substantially in this arena. I demonstrate how the collective action problem leads to a lack of private investment as highlighted by the prisoner’s dilemma game. I conduct a multi country regression test to ascertain the factors that influence the dissemination of IT. I then analyze the impact of the United States and South Korean government on ICT by process tracing the role of each government in the dissemination of ICT. My results support my hypothesis. The policy implications for this study are the increase in the level of US government involvement in ICT through encouraging private sector participation, creating new laws, and increasing access to technology in public education

Trapped in the Digital Divide: The Distributive Paradigm in Community Informatics

This paper argues that over-reliance on a distributive paradigm in community informatics practice has restricted the scope of the high tech equity agenda. Drawing on five years of participatory action research with low-income women in upstate New York, I explore the ways in which distributive understandings of technology and inequality obscure the day-to-day interactions these women have with ICT and overlook their justified critical ambivalence towards technology. Finally, I offer unique insights and powerful strategies of resistance suggested by my research collaborators in a drawing exercise intended to elicit alternative articulations of digital equity. If we begin from their points of view, the problems and solutions that can and should be entertained in our scholarship and practice look quite different

Reality Check: assessing the (un)likelihood of cyberterrorism

This chapter argues that debates around the threat posed by cyberterrorism have been dominated by a focus on issues relating to technological potentialities. To balance this, it focuses on the ‘terrorism’ aspect of cyberterrorism, arguing that it is important to situate cyber attacks within an analysis of terrorist interests and options. Doing so, it argues, leads to a far more optimistic forecast of the likelihood of cyberterrorism than is common, for four reasons. First, the costs of cyber attacks – although difficult to estimate – are vastly higher than those of non-cyber equivalents, such as car bombings. Second, terrorist groups typically lack the mastery to carry out successful cyber attacks which are exponentially more difficult than non-cyber terrorism. Third, the destructive potential of non-cyber attacks can be far more readily materialised than that of cyber attacks. And, fourth, cyberterrorism lacks the theatricality of more conventional attacks and therefore is likely to be less desirable to terrorist groups. Taken together, these four arguments indicate that cyberterrorism remains far less likely than is frequently supposed