Thomas Rid
Biographic Data
| ID | 1493900 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Rid |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Rid |
| SIGNATURE | RID T |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 111 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Attributing digital covert action
How can digital covert action be attributed? This paper revisits one of the most complex, most significant, and most mysterious digital covert actions of our time: a 2015 hack-and-leak case known among investigators as ‘WikiSaudiLeaks’ that so far has evaded attribution. We argue that WikiSaudiLeaks was not a stand-alone event, but a puzzle piece in a larger covert action campaign that involved advanced computer network exploitation, computer net…
The New Makers of Modern Strategy
Active measures
This revelatory and dramatic history of disinformation traces the rise of secret organized deception operations from the interwar period to contemporary internet troll farms
An Imperfect Weapon
David E. Sanger has extraordinary access, and a better feel for political constraints and personalities than most journalists, but his book is a missed opportunity
Cryptopolitik and the Darknet
Encryption policy is becoming a crucial test of the values of liberal democracy in the twenty-first century
Attributing Cyber Attacks
Who did it? Attribution is fundamental. Human lives and the security of the state may depend on ascribing agency to an agent. In the context of computer network intrusions, attribution is commonly seen as one of the most intractable technical problems, as either solvable or not solvable, and as dependent mainly on the available forensic evidence. But is it? Is this a productive understanding of attribution? — This article argues that attribution …
More Attacks, Less Violence
A response to John Stone, Dale Peterson, and Gary McGraw on cyber war
Deterrence beyond the State
Israel's experience with deterrence is unique: it is older, more diverse, and more experimental than that of any other state. How did Israel's strategy of deterrence evolve? How was it adapted to fit the non-state threat? And what is its utility? This article argues that Israel's experience with deterrence beyond the state can best be understood through the conceptual lenses provided by the other grand deterrence debate, that in the philosophy of…
Cyber War Will Not Take Place
For almost two decades, experts and defense establishments the world over have been predicting that cyber war is coming. But is it? This article argues in three steps that cyber war has never happened in the past, that cyber war does not take place in the present, and that it is unlikely that cyber war will occur in the future. It first outlines what would constitute cyber war: a potentially lethal, instrumental, and political act of force conduc…
The Nineteenth Century Origins of Counterinsurgency Doctrine
In counterinsurgency, the population is the center of gravity. This insight has become a key doctrinal tenet of modern armed conflict. But where does it come from? The razzia, a tactic introduced by the French in North Africa around 1840, first thrust tribal populations into the focus of modern operational thinking. Soon the pioneering bureaux arabes added an administrative, civil, and political element. Eventually, in the 1890s, French operation…
War 2.0
War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age argues that two intimately connected grassroots trends—the rise of insurgencies and the rise of the web—are putting modern armies under huge pressure to adapt new forms of counterinsurgency to new forms of social war. After the U.S. military—transformed into a lean, lethal, computerized force—faltered in Iraq after 2003, a robust insurgency arose. Counterinsurgency became a social form of war—inde…
The Roots of Germany's Russia Policy
In the aftermath of the Cold War, many American observers expected that the new Germany would more or less follow in the strong Atlanticist tradition of the old West Germany and its Conservative leadership in particular. A rejuvenated, reunited Germany is now seeking a more prominent role in international affairs, but its foreign policy is evolving away from the staunch Atlanticism that predominated during the Cold War. Two decades after the fall…
Germany's Options in Afghanistan
Germany's military mission in Afghanistan has become increasingly politicised in the eight years since it was launched. Political and ideological differences between parties and even between ministries are becoming more pronounced, not less. This trend narrows the room for manoeuvre and limits the strategic debate. Greater instability in Kunduz province, at the heart of Germany's area of regional responsibility in Afghanistan, has two immediate e…
Forum
In the August–September 2009 issue of Survival (vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 31–48), Philipp Rotmann, David Tohn and Jaron Wharton argued that the US military's change to a counterinsurgency posture in the on-going conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq was catalysed by two products of an institutional culture that strove to be self-learning: the response of junior leadership to tactical problems and senior institutional dissidents driving deep, controversial …
Razzia
The razzia, a tactic of swift and brutal raids used by the French military against recalcitrant tribes in Algeria in the 1840s, was a necessary step in modern military thought. At first glance the destructive and violent razzias stand in stark contrast to the constructive and non-violent bureaux arabesan institutional ancestor of Provincial Reconstruction Teams. But both were developed in the same conflict and by the same men. These two innovatio…
War and Media Operations
Cyber War Will Not Take Place
For almost two decades, experts and defense establishments the world over have been predicting that cyber war is coming. But is it? This article argues in three steps that cyber war has never happened in the past, that cyber war does not take place in the present, and that it is unlikely that cyber war will occur in the future. It first outlines what would constitute cyber war: a potentially lethal, instrumental, and political act of force conduc…
Attributing Cyber Attacks
Who did it? Attribution is fundamental. Human lives and the security of the state may depend on ascribing agency to an agent. In the context of computer network intrusions, attribution is commonly seen as one of the most intractable technical problems, as either solvable or not solvable, and as dependent mainly on the available forensic evidence. But is it? Is this a productive understanding of attribution? — This article argues that attribution …
The Nineteenth Century Origins of Counterinsurgency Doctrine
In counterinsurgency, the population is the center of gravity. This insight has become a key doctrinal tenet of modern armed conflict. But where does it come from? The razzia, a tactic introduced by the French in North Africa around 1840, first thrust tribal populations into the focus of modern operational thinking. Soon the pioneering bureaux arabes added an administrative, civil, and political element. Eventually, in the 1890s, French operation…
Deterrence beyond the State
Israel's experience with deterrence is unique: it is older, more diverse, and more experimental than that of any other state. How did Israel's strategy of deterrence evolve? How was it adapted to fit the non-state threat? And what is its utility? This article argues that Israel's experience with deterrence beyond the state can best be understood through the conceptual lenses provided by the other grand deterrence debate, that in the philosophy of…
Razzia
The razzia, a tactic of swift and brutal raids used by the French military against recalcitrant tribes in Algeria in the 1840s, was a necessary step in modern military thought. At first glance the destructive and violent razzias stand in stark contrast to the constructive and non-violent bureaux arabesan institutional ancestor of Provincial Reconstruction Teams. But both were developed in the same conflict and by the same men. These two innovatio…
The New Makers of Modern Strategy
Cryptopolitik and the Darknet
Encryption policy is becoming a crucial test of the values of liberal democracy in the twenty-first century
Germany's Options in Afghanistan
Germany's military mission in Afghanistan has become increasingly politicised in the eight years since it was launched. Political and ideological differences between parties and even between ministries are becoming more pronounced, not less. This trend narrows the room for manoeuvre and limits the strategic debate. Greater instability in Kunduz province, at the heart of Germany's area of regional responsibility in Afghanistan, has two immediate e…
More Attacks, Less Violence
A response to John Stone, Dale Peterson, and Gary McGraw on cyber war
The Roots of Germany's Russia Policy
In the aftermath of the Cold War, many American observers expected that the new Germany would more or less follow in the strong Atlanticist tradition of the old West Germany and its Conservative leadership in particular. A rejuvenated, reunited Germany is now seeking a more prominent role in international affairs, but its foreign policy is evolving away from the staunch Atlanticism that predominated during the Cold War. Two decades after the fall…
Forum
In the August–September 2009 issue of Survival (vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 31–48), Philipp Rotmann, David Tohn and Jaron Wharton argued that the US military's change to a counterinsurgency posture in the on-going conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq was catalysed by two products of an institutional culture that strove to be self-learning: the response of junior leadership to tactical problems and senior institutional dissidents driving deep, controversial …
War and Media Operations
War 2.0
War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age argues that two intimately connected grassroots trends—the rise of insurgencies and the rise of the web—are putting modern armies under huge pressure to adapt new forms of counterinsurgency to new forms of social war. After the U.S. military—transformed into a lean, lethal, computerized force—faltered in Iraq after 2003, a robust insurgency arose. Counterinsurgency became a social form of war—inde…
The Roots of Germany's Russia Policy
In the aftermath of the Cold War, many American observers expected that the new Germany would more or less follow in the strong Atlanticist tradition of the old West Germany and its Conservative leadership in particular. A rejuvenated, reunited Germany is now seeking a more prominent role in international affairs, but its foreign policy is evolving away from the staunch Atlanticism that predominated during the Cold War. Two decades after the fall…
Germany's Options in Afghanistan
Germany's military mission in Afghanistan has become increasingly politicised in the eight years since it was launched. Political and ideological differences between parties and even between ministries are becoming more pronounced, not less. This trend narrows the room for manoeuvre and limits the strategic debate. Greater instability in Kunduz province, at the heart of Germany's area of regional responsibility in Afghanistan, has two immediate e…
Forum
In the August–September 2009 issue of Survival (vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 31–48), Philipp Rotmann, David Tohn and Jaron Wharton argued that the US military's change to a counterinsurgency posture in the on-going conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq was catalysed by two products of an institutional culture that strove to be self-learning: the response of junior leadership to tactical problems and senior institutional dissidents driving deep, controversial …
Razzia
The razzia, a tactic of swift and brutal raids used by the French military against recalcitrant tribes in Algeria in the 1840s, was a necessary step in modern military thought. At first glance the destructive and violent razzias stand in stark contrast to the constructive and non-violent bureaux arabesan institutional ancestor of Provincial Reconstruction Teams. But both were developed in the same conflict and by the same men. These two innovatio…
The Nineteenth Century Origins of Counterinsurgency Doctrine
In counterinsurgency, the population is the center of gravity. This insight has become a key doctrinal tenet of modern armed conflict. But where does it come from? The razzia, a tactic introduced by the French in North Africa around 1840, first thrust tribal populations into the focus of modern operational thinking. Soon the pioneering bureaux arabes added an administrative, civil, and political element. Eventually, in the 1890s, French operation…
Deterrence beyond the State
Israel's experience with deterrence is unique: it is older, more diverse, and more experimental than that of any other state. How did Israel's strategy of deterrence evolve? How was it adapted to fit the non-state threat? And what is its utility? This article argues that Israel's experience with deterrence beyond the state can best be understood through the conceptual lenses provided by the other grand deterrence debate, that in the philosophy of…
Cyber War Will Not Take Place
For almost two decades, experts and defense establishments the world over have been predicting that cyber war is coming. But is it? This article argues in three steps that cyber war has never happened in the past, that cyber war does not take place in the present, and that it is unlikely that cyber war will occur in the future. It first outlines what would constitute cyber war: a potentially lethal, instrumental, and political act of force conduc…
More Attacks, Less Violence
A response to John Stone, Dale Peterson, and Gary McGraw on cyber war
Attributing Cyber Attacks
Who did it? Attribution is fundamental. Human lives and the security of the state may depend on ascribing agency to an agent. In the context of computer network intrusions, attribution is commonly seen as one of the most intractable technical problems, as either solvable or not solvable, and as dependent mainly on the available forensic evidence. But is it? Is this a productive understanding of attribution? — This article argues that attribution …
Cryptopolitik and the Darknet
Encryption policy is becoming a crucial test of the values of liberal democracy in the twenty-first century
An Imperfect Weapon
David E. Sanger has extraordinary access, and a better feel for political constraints and personalities than most journalists, but his book is a missed opportunity
Active measures
This revelatory and dramatic history of disinformation traces the rise of secret organized deception operations from the interwar period to contemporary internet troll farms
The New Makers of Modern Strategy
Attributing digital covert action
How can digital covert action be attributed? This paper revisits one of the most complex, most significant, and most mysterious digital covert actions of our time: a 2015 hack-and-leak case known among investigators as ‘WikiSaudiLeaks’ that so far has evaded attribution. We argue that WikiSaudiLeaks was not a stand-alone event, but a puzzle piece in a larger covert action campaign that involved advanced computer network exploitation, computer net…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Political economy (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Computer security (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies (4 works)