More Attacks, Less Violence
THOMAS RID
King’s College London, UK
ABSTRACT A response to John Stone, Dale Peterson, and Gary McGraw on
cyber war.
KEY WORDS: Cyber War, Cyber Security, Violence, Sabotage, Power
The discussion of cyber war, indeed the discussion of war, is hampered
by a lack of precision. That lack of precision is widespread, as John
Stone pointed out in his powerful critique of my original article. This
confusion may be bound up with the history of the discipline of
strategic studies and its unwieldy Cold War-baggage. Stone’s criticism
is two-pronged: he maintains that I did not properly distinguish
violence, force, and power, merged in the German Gewalt; and second
he argued that my distinction between war and sabotage would ‘do too
much violence (sic) to accepted notions of what amounts to an act of
war’. I consider both arguments in turn.1
Violence
Violence administered through cyber attack differs from traditional
violence in several ways. Two stand out: violence inflicted through
computer code is indirect and unqualified. First, the human body is not
directly vulnerable to cyber attack, only indirectly. The reason for this
is as banal as it is important: computer code, on its own, cannot harm a
biological system, only a computer-controlled technical system. A cyber
attacker with violent ambitions has to ‘weaponise’ a primary target
system. Any cyber attack with the goal of physical destruction, be it
1
John Stone, ‘Cyber War Will Take Place!,’ Journal of Strategic Studies 36/1 (February
2013), 5http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2012.7304854. See also Thomas Rid,
‘Cyber War Will Not Take Place,’ Journal of Strategic Studies 35/1 (February 2012), 5–
32.
The Journal of Strategic Studies, 2013
Vol. 36, No. 1, 139–
© 2013 Taylor & Francis
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material destruction or harming human life, has to utilize force or
energy that is embedded in that targeted system or created by it. Code,
quite simply, does not come with its own explosive charge. Codecaused
destruction is therefore parasitic on a target. And that primary
target cannot be a human body. Yet the human body, in several ways, is
the foundation of violence.
This leads to the second observation: that indirect code-borne
violence is bound to remain unqualified. To understand this, it is indeed
necessary to take up Stone’s recommendation, to go beyond strategy,
and seek help in political theory. Taking the human body as the starting
point for political theory has a long tradition, especially among
political philosophers concerned with the phenomenon of violence and
how to overcome it.2
A most powerful driving force for all political
organization is the universal weakness of all humans, and their
resulting need for political organization to abolish the use of violence
for self-help and overcome a natural state of conflict. One of the most
inspiring writers on this subject is Alessandro Passerin d’Entre`ves, a
mid-twentieth century political philosopher who strongly influenced
Hannah Arendt’s writings on violence, quoted by Stone. In The Notion
of the State, Passerin d’Entre`ves discusses the use of force at length. The
political thinker was struggling with the age-old question for, as he
called it, the long and mysterious ascent that leads from force to
authority, what transforms ‘force into law, fear into respect, coercion
into consent – necessity into liberty’.3
Force, when used by the
sovereign in order to enforce the law, ceases to be mere violence. By
representing the legal order, force becomes institutionalized, ‘qualified’
in Passerin d’Entre`ves’s phrase, ‘force, by the very fact of being
qualified, ceases to be force’ and is being transformed into power.4
Violence administered through computer code, as a result of its indirect
nature, is bound to remain unqualified. The German language,
remarkably, never disqualified violence. The notion of Cybergewalt,
or indeed cyberpower, makes little sense – not pointing out this crucial
limitation is a shortcoming of my original article, not its narrow
conception of violence.
2
See the opening paragraph of chapter 13, ‘Of the naturall condition of mankind, as
concerning the felicity, and misery’, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin
1996 [1651]), 86.
3
Alessandro Passerin d’Entre`ves, The Notion of the State (Oxford: Oxford University
Press 1967), 2.
4
See Hannah Arendt’s discussion of Passerin d’Entre`ves’s contribution, Hannah
Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1970), 37.
Thomas Rid140
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Sabotage
The rise of cyber attacks has made it easier to distinguish between
violent and non-violent attacks. But sabotage, contrary to Stone’s
argument, does not rest on this distinction. Sabotage is the deliberate
attempt to weaken or disable an economic or military system. The
means used in sabotage may not always lead to physical destruction
and overt violence. Sabotage may be designed to merely disable
machines or production processes temporarily, and explicitly avoid
damaging anything in a violent way. Again I gladly take Stone’s advice
and go beyond the Cold War. The question of sabotage and violence,
even if only directed at machines, was controversial among syndicalists
in the early twentieth century. Delaying production was one thing;
destroying property was something else, something that could have dire
consequences, legal as well as political ones. In America, political
opponents had accused the radical syndicalists of relying on crude
violence to achieve their goals. Some labour organizers considered it
therefore necessary to distinguish between violence on the one hand
and sabotage on the other. Arturo Giovannitti, a prominent ItalianAmerican
union leader and poet, argued for the latter in the foreword
to the 1913 English translation of E´mile Pouget’s much-noted book
Sabotage. Sabotage, Giovannitti wrote, was:
Any skilful operation on the machinery of production intended
not to destroy or render it defective, but only to disable it
temporarily and to put it out of running condition in order to
make impossible the work of scabs and thus to secure the
complete and real stoppage of work during a strike.5
Sabotage is this and nothing but this, he added, using the language of
political activism rather than the language of a scholarship, ‘It has
nothing to do with violence, neither to life nor to property.’6
Such subtle differences made sense in theory. In practice it was often
difficult to distinguish between permanent destruction and temporary
disablement – for several reasons, two of which will serve to highlight
the novelties of sabotage by cyber attack. The first reason is the
difference between hardware and software. If temporarily interrupting
a process required damaging hardware, then the line between violence
and sabotage became hard to draw. Cyber attacks, by contrast, restrain
violence and make that line easier to draw: software attacks by default
5
E´mile Pouget, and Arturo M. Giovannitti, Sabotage (Chicago: C.H. Kerr & Co.
1913), 6.
6
Ibid.
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maliciously affect software and business processes by exploiting
insecure systems, as Gary McGraw outlined – damaging hardware
and mechanical industrial processes through software-attack, as Dale
Peterson’s response shows, is a highly specialized, bespoke, and more
difficult undertaking.7
Second, online attacks also made it easier, or
possible in the first place, to isolate sabotage from volatile group
dynamics. Remote cyber sabotage is highly unlikely to escalate into real
bloodshed or street violence, as was not uncommon for the
syndicalists – activist and perpetrators of code-borne sabotage, by
contrast, may not even be physically present at the targeted site.
At closer examination the opposite of ‘cyber war’ is taking place: the
rise of cyber attacks reduces the amount of violence and violent
expertise embedded in sabotage, espionage, and even subversion – and,
paradoxically, makes these activities more cost-efficient in the process.8
Note on Contributor
Thomas Rid is a Reader in War Studies at King’s College London. A
book based on the original article will be published in April 2013 under
the same title.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1970).
Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (London: Penguin 1996 [1651]).
McGraw, Gary, ‘Cyber War is Inevitable (Unless We Build Security In),’ Journal of Strategic
Studies 36/1 (February 2013), 5http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2012.7420134.
Passerin d’Entre`ves, Alessandro, The Notion of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1967).
Peterson, Dale, ‘Offensive Cyber Weapons: Construction, Development, and Employment,’
Journal of Strategic Studies 36/1 (February 2013), 5http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2012.
7420144.
Pouget, E´mile and Arturo M. Giovannitti, Sabotage (Chicago: C.H. Kerr & Co. 1913).
Rid, Thomas, ‘Cyber War Will Not Take Place,’ Journal of Strategic Studies 35/1 (February 2012),
5–32.
Rid, Thomas, Cyber War Will Not Take Place (London: Hurst Publishers 2013).
Stone, John, ‘Cyber War Will Take Place!,’ Journal of Strategic Studies 36/1 (February 2013),
5http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2012.7304854.
7
Gary McGraw, ‘Cyber War is Inevitable (Unless We Build Security In),’ Journal of
Strategic Studies 36/1 (February 2013), 5http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2012.
7420134; Dale Peterson, ‘Offensive Cyber Weapons: Construction, Development, and
Employment,’ Journal of Strategic Studies 36/1 (February 2013), 5http://dx.doi.org/
10.1080/01402390.2012.7420144.
8
For a more detailed outline of this argument, see Thomas Rid, Cyber War Will Not
Take Place (London: Hurst Publishers 2013).
142 Thomas Rid
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