of information communication technologies within a military strategy that is endorsed by a state." And if you go to the Pentagon they will speak about this in different ways, they put it under different headings, in terms of information operations or cyber warfare, cyber attacks, that sort of thing. Was Russia's attack on Estonia in 2007 the first broad-based state example of this?Taddeo: The attack on Estonia is certainly one example of it, but it's only one instance, and it's not the first. You could, for example, point to the SWORDS robots that were used in Iraq several years prior to the attack on Estonia, or the use of predator drones, etc. Remember information warfare encompasses more than only information communication technologies used through the web; these technologies can be used in several different domains and in several different ways. But it's hard to point to a definitive first example of this. It goes back quite a ways and these technologies have been evolving for sometime now; remember that the first Internet protocols were developed by DARPA---in some sense, these technologies were born in the military sphere. Turing himself, the father of computer science, worked mainly within military programs during the Second World War.Interesting, but do I understand you correctly that you distinguish this new kind of information warfare from pre-internet information technologies like the radio and the telegraph? Taddeo: Well those are certainly information technologies, and to some extent information has always been an important part of warfare, because we have always wanted to communicate and to destroy our enemies' information structures and communication capabilities. What we want to distinguish here is the use of these new kinds of information communication technologies, because they have proved to be much more revolutionary in their effects on warfare than previous technologies like telegraphs or telephones or radios or walkie-talkies. What's revolutionary about them is that they have restructured the very reality in which we perceive ourselves as living in, and the way in which we think about the concepts of warfare or the state. Take for example the concept of the state: we currently define a state as a political unit that exercises power over a certain physical territory. But when you consider that states are now trying to also dominate certain parts of cyberspace, our definition becomes problematic because cyberspace doesn't have a defined territory. The information revolution is shuffling these concepts around in really interesting ways from a philosophical perspective, and more specifically, from an ethical perspective. dronecarry_615.jpgAn Israeli soldier carries a drone. Reuters.In your paper you mention the use of robotic weapons like drones as one example of the rapid development of information warfare. You note that the U.S. government deployed only 150 robotic weapons in Iraq in 2004, but that number had grown to 12,000 by 2008. Is this a trend you expect to continue?Taddeo: I expect so. There are several ways that the political decisions to endorse or deploy these machines are encouraged by the nature of these technologies. For one they are quite a bit cheaper than