[Infowarrior] - 26 Years After Gibson, Pentagon Defines 'Cyberspace'

[Richard Forno]

(the Inside Defense article mentioned is behind a paywall.......rf)


26 Years After Gibson, Pentagon Defines 'Cyberspace'
By Noah Shachtman EmailMay 23, 2008 | 3:01:00 AMCategories: Info War

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/05/pentagon-define.html

Bill "More than two decades after novelist William Gibson coined the  
term cyberspace as a 'consensual hallucination' of data... the  
Pentagon has come up with its own definition," Inside Defense  
reports.  "A May 12 'for official use only' memo signed by Deputy  
Defense Secretary Gordon England... offers a 28-word meaning for the  
term."

It is decidedly "less poetic" than Gibson's.  It is different from  
previous military definitions.  And it doesn't exactly square with how  
the Air Force's new "Cyberspace Command" sees this emerging battlefield.

     Cyberspace, England writes, is “a global domain within the  
information environment consisting of the interdependent network of  
information technology infrastructures, including the Internet,  
telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors  
and controllers.”

     It is a far cry from the prose Gibson used in his 1984 novel  
“Neuromancer” to describe cyberspace: “A graphic representation of  
data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.  
Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the  
mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”

The Pentagon's definition will “serve as the foundation” upon which  
the Defense Department will “further mature this warfighting domain,”  
England writes.  And "it is not the first time the U.S. government has  
tried to define, or redefine, cyberspace," Inside Defense notes.

     “Cyberspace is composed of hundreds of thousands of  
interconnected computers, servers, routers, switches, and fiber optic  
cables that allow our critical infrastructures to work,” states the  
Bush administration’s 2003 National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.  
“Thus, the healthy functioning of cyberspace is essential to our  
economy and our national security.”

     In the 2006 National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations,  
a classified document, the Joint Chiefs of Staff defined cyberspace as  
“a domain characterized by the use of electronics and the  
electromagnetic spectrum to store, modify and exchange data via  
networked systems and associated physical infrastructures.”

Major General William T. Lord, the chief of the Air Force's new  
Cyberspace Command, expanded that definition evern further, saying,  
"We define the domain as the entire electromagnetic spectrum."  
Everything from microwaves to radio to lasers to x-rays, on other  
words. He sees his fledgling force conducting "not just [c]omputer  
network operations, but [a]lso [e]lectronic warfare, electronic combat  
and even, potentially, directed energy."

Exactly how that will square with the Pentagon new definition of  
cyberspace remains to be seen.