Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the rise of cybersecurity from a critical securitization perspective that asks how threats are constructed and who or what is to be protected.

Paper long abstract:

Digital media and the 'war on terror' have blurred the spatial and temporal boundaries of war and peace and of public and private. Cybersecurity is obscuring distinctions among data security, privacy, corporate interests, and national security. Where citizens' interests are represented in this domain as distinct from the interests of the government or corporations, they are more often represented as 'users' and 'consumers' than as citizens. New discourses of cyberthreat and logics of cybersecurity contribute to an unprecedented militarization of private civil and social life that now depend on digital media. The same military contractors that design weapons systems have become providers of cybersecurity. This development in post 9-11 American culture portends profound consequences for citizenship and for scholarship as we are encouraged to conceptualize information technologies as potential weapons and to envision possible social and technological futures through the constraints of a militaristic lens. This paper explores the rise of cybersecurity from a critical securitization perspective that asks how threats are constructed and who or what is to be protected. It analyzes American mainstream journalism, and statements by public officials and experts over the past few years in the context of the social history of public culture surrounding the Internet