Shadowing Cybersecurity: Expertise, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Uncertainty | Rebecca Slayton

About the Event: As governments, corporations, and citizens have become critically dependent on cyberspace, a transnational field of expertise has emerged to protect them from cyberattack. But unlike engineers whose goals are more quantifiably demonstrated—a missile hits its target with a particular probability, computer chips fail at a known rate—cybersecurity experts cannot prove that a system is “secure.”  In fact, experts paradoxically demonstrate skills in cybersecurity by demonstrating insecurities—for example, hacking systems to reveal their vulnerabilities. So how can these experts offer any authoritative assurance of security? What does growing reliance on cybersecurity experts—and the multinational industry in which they often work--mean for national sovereignty and international relations? Conversely, how have the distinctive interests of various private and government actors shaped the development of this relatively new field of expertise? And what does all this mean for our understanding of the relationships between expertise, transnationalism, and power in an age of global interdependence and vulnerability? These questions are addressed by Rebecca Slayton's book in progress, Shadowing Cybersecurity. The working hypothesis is that cybersecurity experts established themselves as authorities by developing ways of making risks visible and apparently controllable—a process Slayton calls shadowing cybersecurity. In this talk Slayton will present early findings and invite feedback.

About the Speaker: Rebecca Slayton is Associate Professor, jointly in the Science & Technology Studies Department and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, both at Cornell University. She is also a 2022-23 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her research examines the relationships between and among risk, governance, and expertise, with a focus on international security and cooperation since World War II. Her first book, Arguments that Count, shows how the rise of computing reshaped perceptions of the promise and risks of missile defense, and won the 2015 Computer History Museum Prize. Slayton’s second book, Shadowing Cybersecurity, examines the emergence of cybersecurity expertise through the interplay of innovation and repair.

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