Ronald J Deibert
Biographic Data
| ID | 386431 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ronald J Deibert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ronald J |
| FAMILY NAME | Deibert |
| SIGNATURE | DEIBERT R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 231 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Ethical and Legal Dilemmas of Digital Accountability Research and the Utility of International Norm-Setting
Nearly every aspect of our life is impacted by digital technologies manufactured and sold by companies. Legislative frameworks to limit the harms of such technologies have been slow to develop and remain entangled in controversy. 1 The expanding role of digital technologies has been accompanied by a disturbing descent into authoritarianism in many countries that is also, in part, fueled by these very same tools. 2 The decline of liberal democrati…
Subversion Inc: The Age of Private Espionage
Over the last decade, a sophisticated and lucrative industry has sprung up that puts potent surveillance and intelligence capabilities in the hands of a wide range of private actors. Clandestine influence operations, targeted espionage against civil society, and political subversion—an organized activity whereby the decay of legitimate political institutions is deliberately and surreptitiously seeded—are easier to undertake than ever before. At l…
The Information Security Cultures of Journalism
This article is an exploratory study of the influence of beat and employment status on the information security culture of journalism (security-related values, mental models, and practices that are shared across the profession). The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 16 journalists based in Canada in staff or freelance positions working on investigative or non-investigative beats. We find that journalism has a multitude of security…
A tale of two cybers - how threat reporting by cybersecurity firms systematically underrepresents threats to civil society
Public and academic knowledge of cyber conflict relies heavily on data from commercial threat reporting. There are reasons to be concerned that these data provide a distorted view of cyber threat activity. Commercial cybersecurity firms only focus on a subset of the universe of threats, and they only report publicly on a subset of the subset. High end threats to high-profile victims are prioritized in commercial reporting while threats to civil s…
Online Surveillance, Censorship, and Encryption in Academia
The Internet and digital technologies have become indispensable in academia. A world without email, search engines, and online databases is practically unthinkable. Yet, in this time of digital dependence, the academy barely demonstrates an appetite to reflect upon the new challenges that digital technologies have brought to the scholarly profession. This forum's inspiration was a roundtable discussion at the 2017 International Studies Associatio…
Three Painful Truths About Social Media
Social media have been battered in recent years by growing concerns about disinformation, privacy breaches, and the spread of harmful speech. This article itemizes the problems surrounding social media and political authority in the form of "three painful truths"—so termed because, although there is an emerging consensus around these points, many people are reluctant to squarely acknowledge the depth of the problems and the fundamental changes th…
Censors Get Smart: Evidence from Psiphon in Iran
Information controls are actions intended to deny, disrupt, monitor, or secure information for political ends. They can be implemented using a wide variety of technical and nontechnical means. Political contests over the control of information are heightened around important events, such as major anniversaries, armed conflicts, protests, and elections. In this paper, we offer a comparative case study of online censorship of the circumvention tool…
Toward a Human-Centric Approach to Cybersecurity
A “national security–centric” approach currently dominates cybersecurity policies and practices. Derived from a realist theory of world politics in which states compete with each other for survival and relative advantage, the principal cybersecurity threats are conceived as those affecting sovereign states, such as damage to critical infrastructure within their territorial jurisdictions. As part of a roundtable on “Competing Visions for Cyberspac…
Cyclones in cyberspace: Information shaping and denial in the 2008 Russia–Georgia war
While the rhetoric of cyber war is often exaggerated, there have been recent cases of international conflict in which cyberspace has played a prominent role. In this article, we analyze the impact of cyberspace in the conflict between Russia and Georgia over the disputed territory of South Ossetia in August 2008. We examine the role of strategic communications, information operations, operations in and through cyberspace, and conventional combat …
Global Governance and the Spread of Cyberspace Controls
States are moving to assert their interests more forcefully in cyberspace and associated governance regimes. Traditionally, transnational networks of engineers, based primarily in the United States and Europe, have been the primary architects of cyberspace governance, with the users and private sector shaping cyberspace itself. However, governments are becoming increasingly influential across a number of governance forums and are deliberating on …
Blurred Boundaries: Probing the Ethics of Cyberspace Research
Liberation vs. Control: The Future of Cyberspace
Among theorists of new information and communication technologies, there is a persistent tension between those who see them as technologies of liberation, and those who see them as technologies of control. We argue that the dichotomy itself is misleading, suggesting a basic opposition between forces of light and forces of darkness. In fact, the situation is much more complex and needs to be qualified. Rather than seeing technologies in opposition…
Risking Security: Policies and Paradoxes of Cyberspace Security
Conceptualizations of cyberspace security can be divided into two related dimensions, articulated as “risks”: risks to the physical realm of computer and communication technologies (risks to cyberspace); and risks that arise from cyberspace and are facilitated or generated by its technologies, but do not directly target the infrastructures per se (risks through cyberspace). There is robust international consensus, growing communities of practice,…
The Virtual Absence of Malice: Cyber Security and Threat Politics
Myriam Dunn Cavelty's new book, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics: US Efforts to Secure the Information Age, provides a theoretically informed analysis of the social construction of cyber-security threats in the context of US national security policy. As Cavelty notes, the topic of cyber-security has gone through many ebbs and flows over the years. During the 1990s, prior to 9/11, the concept was ranked extraordinarily high, with haunting progno…
Black Code: Censorship, Surveillance, and the Militarisation of Cyberspace
Conventional wisdom holds that the Internet's material properties are biased towards openness, and provide the foundation for a global commons of information increasingly beneficial to citizens worldwide. However, pressures from the security and commercial sectors to regulate and control the Internet are beginning to alter its basic material architecture in ways that may undermine not only the activities of global civic networks, but also the lon…
Dark Guests and Great Firewalls: The Internet and Chinese Security Policy
Some believe that the Internet is immune to regulation and is contributing to the demise of the state. Others see the same technology as facilitating surveillance on behalf of states and corporations. To help explore this debate further, this article examines the case of the Internet in China. China—a nondemocratic, authoritarian state—is a “hard case” for those who argue that the Internet cannot be controlled. Even while pushing for the expansio…
International Plug 'n Play? Citizen Activism, the Internet, and Global Public Policy
One of the most dramatic changes in world politics has been the rise to prominence of citizen networks. Among the many factors responsible for their emergence are new communication technologies, and in particular the World-Wide Web. Opinions on the nature and significance of these citizen networks, however, are mixed. Some applaud citizen networks as potential counter-hegemonic forces and expressions of democratic participation. Others see them, …
Harold Innis and the Empire of Speed
Increasingly, International Relations (IR) theorists are drawing inspiration from a broad range of theorists outside the discipline. One thinks of the introduction of Antonio Gramsci's writings to IR theorists by Robert Cox, for example, and the ‘school’ that has developed in its wake. Similarly, the works of Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas are all relatively familiar to most IR theorists not because of their writings on wor…
Virtual Resources: International Relations Research Resources on the Web
The explosive growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web in recent years has produced not only the trivial and bizarre, but also information useful for social science research and teaching. Yet most of this information is difficult to locate, particularly for those unfamiliar with the Web, primarily because of its nonlinear architecture—called “hypertext.” The purpose of this research note is to give scholars a sense of what is unique about re…
Critical Security Studies
The Global Political Economy of Communications
Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation
Exorcismus Theoriae: Pragmatism, Metaphors and the Return of the Medieval in IR Theory
Recently, concerns have been raised among a growing and diverse group of IR theorists that the basic concepts and categories we employ to describe, interpret and explain the world around us are no longer useful or illuminating. There is a sense, in other words, that the discipline's predominant way-of-seeing the world — what some have called a state-centric/billiard-ball bias — has become a kind of ontological blinder. This article addresses the …
Typographica: The medium and the medieval-to-modern transformation
There is an emerging consensus among a growing body of scholars that the present era is one in which fundamental change is occurring. Among International Relations theorists, for example, John Ruggie has argued that we are witnessing ‘a shift not in the play of power politics but of the stage on which that play is performed’. Similarly, James Rosenau contends that the present era constitutes a historical break leading to a ‘postinternational poli…
Three Painful Truths About Social Media
Social media have been battered in recent years by growing concerns about disinformation, privacy breaches, and the spread of harmful speech. This article itemizes the problems surrounding social media and political authority in the form of "three painful truths"—so termed because, although there is an emerging consensus around these points, many people are reluctant to squarely acknowledge the depth of the problems and the fundamental changes th…
Liberation vs. Control: The Future of Cyberspace
Among theorists of new information and communication technologies, there is a persistent tension between those who see them as technologies of liberation, and those who see them as technologies of control. We argue that the dichotomy itself is misleading, suggesting a basic opposition between forces of light and forces of darkness. In fact, the situation is much more complex and needs to be qualified. Rather than seeing technologies in opposition…
Black Code: Censorship, Surveillance, and the Militarisation of Cyberspace
Conventional wisdom holds that the Internet's material properties are biased towards openness, and provide the foundation for a global commons of information increasingly beneficial to citizens worldwide. However, pressures from the security and commercial sectors to regulate and control the Internet are beginning to alter its basic material architecture in ways that may undermine not only the activities of global civic networks, but also the lon…
International Plug 'n Play? Citizen Activism, the Internet, and Global Public Policy
One of the most dramatic changes in world politics has been the rise to prominence of citizen networks. Among the many factors responsible for their emergence are new communication technologies, and in particular the World-Wide Web. Opinions on the nature and significance of these citizen networks, however, are mixed. Some applaud citizen networks as potential counter-hegemonic forces and expressions of democratic participation. Others see them, …
Cyclones in cyberspace: Information shaping and denial in the 2008 Russia–Georgia war
While the rhetoric of cyber war is often exaggerated, there have been recent cases of international conflict in which cyberspace has played a prominent role. In this article, we analyze the impact of cyberspace in the conflict between Russia and Georgia over the disputed territory of South Ossetia in August 2008. We examine the role of strategic communications, information operations, operations in and through cyberspace, and conventional combat …
A tale of two cybers - how threat reporting by cybersecurity firms systematically underrepresents threats to civil society
Public and academic knowledge of cyber conflict relies heavily on data from commercial threat reporting. There are reasons to be concerned that these data provide a distorted view of cyber threat activity. Commercial cybersecurity firms only focus on a subset of the universe of threats, and they only report publicly on a subset of the subset. High end threats to high-profile victims are prioritized in commercial reporting while threats to civil s…
Toward a Human-Centric Approach to Cybersecurity
A “national security–centric” approach currently dominates cybersecurity policies and practices. Derived from a realist theory of world politics in which states compete with each other for survival and relative advantage, the principal cybersecurity threats are conceived as those affecting sovereign states, such as damage to critical infrastructure within their territorial jurisdictions. As part of a roundtable on “Competing Visions for Cyberspac…
Risking Security: Policies and Paradoxes of Cyberspace Security
Conceptualizations of cyberspace security can be divided into two related dimensions, articulated as “risks”: risks to the physical realm of computer and communication technologies (risks to cyberspace); and risks that arise from cyberspace and are facilitated or generated by its technologies, but do not directly target the infrastructures per se (risks through cyberspace). There is robust international consensus, growing communities of practice,…
Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation
Subversion Inc: The Age of Private Espionage
Over the last decade, a sophisticated and lucrative industry has sprung up that puts potent surveillance and intelligence capabilities in the hands of a wide range of private actors. Clandestine influence operations, targeted espionage against civil society, and political subversion—an organized activity whereby the decay of legitimate political institutions is deliberately and surreptitiously seeded—are easier to undertake than ever before. At l…
Global Governance and the Spread of Cyberspace Controls
States are moving to assert their interests more forcefully in cyberspace and associated governance regimes. Traditionally, transnational networks of engineers, based primarily in the United States and Europe, have been the primary architects of cyberspace governance, with the users and private sector shaping cyberspace itself. However, governments are becoming increasingly influential across a number of governance forums and are deliberating on …
Exorcismus Theoriae: Pragmatism, Metaphors and the Return of the Medieval in IR Theory
Recently, concerns have been raised among a growing and diverse group of IR theorists that the basic concepts and categories we employ to describe, interpret and explain the world around us are no longer useful or illuminating. There is a sense, in other words, that the discipline's predominant way-of-seeing the world — what some have called a state-centric/billiard-ball bias — has become a kind of ontological blinder. This article addresses the …
Virtual Resources: International Relations Research Resources on the Web
The explosive growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web in recent years has produced not only the trivial and bizarre, but also information useful for social science research and teaching. Yet most of this information is difficult to locate, particularly for those unfamiliar with the Web, primarily because of its nonlinear architecture—called “hypertext.” The purpose of this research note is to give scholars a sense of what is unique about re…
Typographica: The medium and the medieval-to-modern transformation
There is an emerging consensus among a growing body of scholars that the present era is one in which fundamental change is occurring. Among International Relations theorists, for example, John Ruggie has argued that we are witnessing ‘a shift not in the play of power politics but of the stage on which that play is performed’. Similarly, James Rosenau contends that the present era constitutes a historical break leading to a ‘postinternational poli…
Online Surveillance, Censorship, and Encryption in Academia
The Internet and digital technologies have become indispensable in academia. A world without email, search engines, and online databases is practically unthinkable. Yet, in this time of digital dependence, the academy barely demonstrates an appetite to reflect upon the new challenges that digital technologies have brought to the scholarly profession. This forum's inspiration was a roundtable discussion at the 2017 International Studies Associatio…
Censors Get Smart: Evidence from Psiphon in Iran
Information controls are actions intended to deny, disrupt, monitor, or secure information for political ends. They can be implemented using a wide variety of technical and nontechnical means. Political contests over the control of information are heightened around important events, such as major anniversaries, armed conflicts, protests, and elections. In this paper, we offer a comparative case study of online censorship of the circumvention tool…
Dark Guests and Great Firewalls: The Internet and Chinese Security Policy
Some believe that the Internet is immune to regulation and is contributing to the demise of the state. Others see the same technology as facilitating surveillance on behalf of states and corporations. To help explore this debate further, this article examines the case of the Internet in China. China—a nondemocratic, authoritarian state—is a “hard case” for those who argue that the Internet cannot be controlled. Even while pushing for the expansio…
Blurred Boundaries: Probing the Ethics of Cyberspace Research
Typographica: The medium and the medieval-to-modern transformation
There is an emerging consensus among a growing body of scholars that the present era is one in which fundamental change is occurring. Among International Relations theorists, for example, John Ruggie has argued that we are witnessing ‘a shift not in the play of power politics but of the stage on which that play is performed’. Similarly, James Rosenau contends that the present era constitutes a historical break leading to a ‘postinternational poli…
The Global Political Economy of Communications
Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation
Exorcismus Theoriae: Pragmatism, Metaphors and the Return of the Medieval in IR Theory
Recently, concerns have been raised among a growing and diverse group of IR theorists that the basic concepts and categories we employ to describe, interpret and explain the world around us are no longer useful or illuminating. There is a sense, in other words, that the discipline's predominant way-of-seeing the world — what some have called a state-centric/billiard-ball bias — has become a kind of ontological blinder. This article addresses the …
Virtual Resources: International Relations Research Resources on the Web
The explosive growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web in recent years has produced not only the trivial and bizarre, but also information useful for social science research and teaching. Yet most of this information is difficult to locate, particularly for those unfamiliar with the Web, primarily because of its nonlinear architecture—called “hypertext.” The purpose of this research note is to give scholars a sense of what is unique about re…
Critical Security Studies
Harold Innis and the Empire of Speed
Increasingly, International Relations (IR) theorists are drawing inspiration from a broad range of theorists outside the discipline. One thinks of the introduction of Antonio Gramsci's writings to IR theorists by Robert Cox, for example, and the ‘school’ that has developed in its wake. Similarly, the works of Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas are all relatively familiar to most IR theorists not because of their writings on wor…
International Plug 'n Play? Citizen Activism, the Internet, and Global Public Policy
One of the most dramatic changes in world politics has been the rise to prominence of citizen networks. Among the many factors responsible for their emergence are new communication technologies, and in particular the World-Wide Web. Opinions on the nature and significance of these citizen networks, however, are mixed. Some applaud citizen networks as potential counter-hegemonic forces and expressions of democratic participation. Others see them, …
Dark Guests and Great Firewalls: The Internet and Chinese Security Policy
Some believe that the Internet is immune to regulation and is contributing to the demise of the state. Others see the same technology as facilitating surveillance on behalf of states and corporations. To help explore this debate further, this article examines the case of the Internet in China. China—a nondemocratic, authoritarian state—is a “hard case” for those who argue that the Internet cannot be controlled. Even while pushing for the expansio…
Black Code: Censorship, Surveillance, and the Militarisation of Cyberspace
Conventional wisdom holds that the Internet's material properties are biased towards openness, and provide the foundation for a global commons of information increasingly beneficial to citizens worldwide. However, pressures from the security and commercial sectors to regulate and control the Internet are beginning to alter its basic material architecture in ways that may undermine not only the activities of global civic networks, but also the lon…
The Virtual Absence of Malice: Cyber Security and Threat Politics
Myriam Dunn Cavelty's new book, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics: US Efforts to Secure the Information Age, provides a theoretically informed analysis of the social construction of cyber-security threats in the context of US national security policy. As Cavelty notes, the topic of cyber-security has gone through many ebbs and flows over the years. During the 1990s, prior to 9/11, the concept was ranked extraordinarily high, with haunting progno…
Liberation vs. Control: The Future of Cyberspace
Among theorists of new information and communication technologies, there is a persistent tension between those who see them as technologies of liberation, and those who see them as technologies of control. We argue that the dichotomy itself is misleading, suggesting a basic opposition between forces of light and forces of darkness. In fact, the situation is much more complex and needs to be qualified. Rather than seeing technologies in opposition…
Risking Security: Policies and Paradoxes of Cyberspace Security
Conceptualizations of cyberspace security can be divided into two related dimensions, articulated as “risks”: risks to the physical realm of computer and communication technologies (risks to cyberspace); and risks that arise from cyberspace and are facilitated or generated by its technologies, but do not directly target the infrastructures per se (risks through cyberspace). There is robust international consensus, growing communities of practice,…
Blurred Boundaries: Probing the Ethics of Cyberspace Research
Cyclones in cyberspace: Information shaping and denial in the 2008 Russia–Georgia war
While the rhetoric of cyber war is often exaggerated, there have been recent cases of international conflict in which cyberspace has played a prominent role. In this article, we analyze the impact of cyberspace in the conflict between Russia and Georgia over the disputed territory of South Ossetia in August 2008. We examine the role of strategic communications, information operations, operations in and through cyberspace, and conventional combat …
Global Governance and the Spread of Cyberspace Controls
States are moving to assert their interests more forcefully in cyberspace and associated governance regimes. Traditionally, transnational networks of engineers, based primarily in the United States and Europe, have been the primary architects of cyberspace governance, with the users and private sector shaping cyberspace itself. However, governments are becoming increasingly influential across a number of governance forums and are deliberating on …
Toward a Human-Centric Approach to Cybersecurity
A “national security–centric” approach currently dominates cybersecurity policies and practices. Derived from a realist theory of world politics in which states compete with each other for survival and relative advantage, the principal cybersecurity threats are conceived as those affecting sovereign states, such as damage to critical infrastructure within their territorial jurisdictions. As part of a roundtable on “Competing Visions for Cyberspac…
Online Surveillance, Censorship, and Encryption in Academia
The Internet and digital technologies have become indispensable in academia. A world without email, search engines, and online databases is practically unthinkable. Yet, in this time of digital dependence, the academy barely demonstrates an appetite to reflect upon the new challenges that digital technologies have brought to the scholarly profession. This forum's inspiration was a roundtable discussion at the 2017 International Studies Associatio…
Three Painful Truths About Social Media
Social media have been battered in recent years by growing concerns about disinformation, privacy breaches, and the spread of harmful speech. This article itemizes the problems surrounding social media and political authority in the form of "three painful truths"—so termed because, although there is an emerging consensus around these points, many people are reluctant to squarely acknowledge the depth of the problems and the fundamental changes th…
Censors Get Smart: Evidence from Psiphon in Iran
Information controls are actions intended to deny, disrupt, monitor, or secure information for political ends. They can be implemented using a wide variety of technical and nontechnical means. Political contests over the control of information are heightened around important events, such as major anniversaries, armed conflicts, protests, and elections. In this paper, we offer a comparative case study of online censorship of the circumvention tool…
The Information Security Cultures of Journalism
This article is an exploratory study of the influence of beat and employment status on the information security culture of journalism (security-related values, mental models, and practices that are shared across the profession). The study is based on semi-structured interviews with 16 journalists based in Canada in staff or freelance positions working on investigative or non-investigative beats. We find that journalism has a multitude of security…
A tale of two cybers - how threat reporting by cybersecurity firms systematically underrepresents threats to civil society
Public and academic knowledge of cyber conflict relies heavily on data from commercial threat reporting. There are reasons to be concerned that these data provide a distorted view of cyber threat activity. Commercial cybersecurity firms only focus on a subset of the universe of threats, and they only report publicly on a subset of the subset. High end threats to high-profile victims are prioritized in commercial reporting while threats to civil s…
Subversion Inc: The Age of Private Espionage
Over the last decade, a sophisticated and lucrative industry has sprung up that puts potent surveillance and intelligence capabilities in the hands of a wide range of private actors. Clandestine influence operations, targeted espionage against civil society, and political subversion—an organized activity whereby the decay of legitimate political institutions is deliberately and surreptitiously seeded—are easier to undertake than ever before. At l…
The Ethical and Legal Dilemmas of Digital Accountability Research and the Utility of International Norm-Setting
Nearly every aspect of our life is impacted by digital technologies manufactured and sold by companies. Legislative frameworks to limit the harms of such technologies have been slow to develop and remain entangled in controversy. 1 The expanding role of digital technologies has been accompanied by a disturbing descent into authoritarianism in many countries that is also, in part, fueled by these very same tools. 2 The decline of liberal democrati…
Political science (21 works) · Law (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Public relations (11 works) · The Internet (11 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Computer security (8 works)