Toward a Political Economy of Cybersecurity - Bradley Fidler
Channel: UCIBrenICS
Date: 2018-05-05

The Department of Informatics is proud to present Bradley Fidler, Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies, 
Stevens Institute of Technology.

"Toward a Political Economy of Cybersecurity"

Abstract: 
Designing and redesigning the Internet’s architecture does more than solve technical questions concerning the best ways for machines to communicate across networks. The solutions to these technical challenges were, and continue to be, solutions to challenges that involve sociopolitical and economic power more broadly. Put another way—and revising Shapin and Schaffer (1985)—solutions to the problems of Internet architectures are solutions to the problem of social order.

This talk draws on my work in two forthcoming books, in which I argue that network and cybersecurity architectures are both political and epistemic. For this talk, I want to discuss cybersecurity: more specifically, I want to explain how cryptography has been incorporated in key network and internet designs along the path to the modern Internet. The shifting (and expanding) place of cryptography within Internet architectures reflects, I argue, competing visions of social order. Rather than something that was never included in original Internet designs, I argue that cryptography was always present in the Internet—and that it was excluded from the civilian Internet by military policy. How cryptography is re¬-incorporated into the Internet can, in turn, help us understand the politics of the Internet in our present moment—and the significance of our drive toward ubiquitous cryptography.

Bio: 
Bradley Fidler is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken NJ, as well as a contractor for Google, ICANN, and the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI). His first book, Inventing Protocol: The Internet and Its Crises (MIT Press), is a study of the politics behind Internet protocols and the unique identifiers (e.g. the domain name hierarchy and the IP address space) they specify. His research includes the technical administration of the Internet, Internet routing, and the intersection of the Internet and national security. He is online at brfidler.com and @brfidler.


Recorded on May 4, 2018.