While we are enjoying the fruits of the possibility of disseminating information in
large quantities and at high speed in this networked society, we have also to take the risk
of forcing ourselves to trade unexpected by-products of cyberspace. Information
and Communications Technology (ICT) can produce a surprisingly large amount of
products and by-products for these technology-dependent people, such as security and
insecurity, welfare and crime, peace and war, to name some. In fact, insecurity, crime and war
are information society's silhouettes, merging easily but it is difficult to eliminate them.
Overall, the Internet services lack of control has become the breeding ground
of insecurity, as a response to which many governments have enacted specific
legislation criminalizing invasive and destructive activities targeted at information systems.
Because security-breaking activities, committed with the assistance of the
globally-connected computer networks, can easily cross the territorial borders, it is unknown but
broadly accepted that different countermeasures may generate a paradise for perpetrators.
Information Warfare (IW) is increasingly listed alongside nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons as a potential Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) or at least
as a weapon of mass disruption (Eriksson, 1999). Under such circumstances, interest in
and concern for cyber warfare have also been prevalent for decades. War-oriented
writers usually exploited such serious and expensive terms as cyber war, information war
and electronic war to spread their impetuous and cheap ideas. |
