Empire online: The US government’s reterritorialization of cyberspace after 9/11

Description

Not long after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the US government responded by creating the Department of Homeland Security, publishing the nation’s first substantial cybersecurity strategy, and passing the PATRIOT Act into law. Among the many reasons for these measures was anticipation of a large-scale cyberattack – a “cyber Pearl Harbor.” Although there has been no such catastrophe in the subsequent two decades, these institutions, strategies, and laws have endured and expanded. They have become particularly effective at securing cyberspace to reproduce structures of US imperialism online. To better understand the post-9/11 moment in the history of the US cybersecurity state, in this presentation I show how the privatization of the internet throughout the 1990s was directly related to the US government’s production of the internet as an object of security. I then trace how this legacy informed key US cyber policies that emerged after 2001.

Speaker Bio:
Jordan Ali is an MA student in Human Geography at the University of Toronto’s Department of Geography & Planning. His research interests lie at the intersection of geography, communication, and new media. “Empire online: The United States government’s reterritorialization of cyberspace after 9/11” is funded by SSHRC and the Canadian Department of National Defence (in partnership with SSHRC).