Academia Ghetto Thread

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

So, I'm not sure if I mentioned, but I got accepted to a winter bridge session weeklong Biotech seminar at UMass Lowell, shuttle provided by Bunker Hill, free lunch. I'm a little on the fence because of missed work potential, but at the same time, it's extra lab experience, particularly in applied biology. The tricky part is that it effects how much I can put towards tuition for spring semester, possibly.

At the same time, I'm transferring all of my online materials from Summer Semester into various MS documents, but that's pretty tedious.

It does sound like awesome experience, though!

[Nephew Twiddleton]

So, I'm not sure if I mentioned, but I got accepted to a winter bridge session weeklong Biotech seminar at UMass Lowell, shuttle provided by Bunker Hill, free lunch. I'm a little on the fence because of missed work potential, but at the same time, it's extra lab experience, particularly in applied biology. The tricky part is that it effects how much I can put towards tuition for spring semester, possibly.

At the same time, I'm transferring all of my online materials from Summer Semester into various MS documents, but that's pretty tedious.

It does sound like awesome experience, though!

It does. I may just have to crunch some numbers and work a really strange work schedule. Like a twelve hour day with an eight and a half hour lunch break

[Cain]

Got my cyberterrorism essay back.  Despite making a complete hash of it, I still got 16/20, which, according to my University's fucked up, weighted score system, is something like 85%.  Someone once explained to me exactly how the weighting system works...unfortunately, that person was a statistics professor, and he seemed to be the only person who actually understood it in the entire university.

Another possible way to frame cyber-terrorism would be through the paradigm of cyber-warfare.  Some scholars of terrorism object to terrorism being linked to warfare, but is nevertheless the case that, as a form of organised political violence, terrorism and warfare share certain key commonalities.  Arguments have been put forward by Arquilla, Ronfeldt and Zanini that terrorism, warfare and crime are part of a interlinked matrix of violence, an evolution in warfare that they refer to as "netwar"1 (though it is important to note the "net" in netwar refers to networks as a method of organisation and not the internet).

This view also has something of a pedigree in the study of terrorism, as Schmid and Jongman both note "many authors see terrorism as a form of war.  In the 1960s, terrorism was generally placed in the context of internal war.  Today, terrorism is often treated as a form of international war, or rather, as its substitute."2  In particular, the work of Brian Jenkins on "surrogate warfare"3 lends support to the hypothesis that terrorism and warfare are linked on some key level.

Some researchers and scholars discussing cyber-conflict and information warfare have already implicitly accepted the assumption that terrorism and warfare are related concepts offline and online.  Hoisington notes that "the practice [of cyberwarfare] currently exists in a legal netherworld"4, a description which makes legal normative arguments against cyber-terrorism a little harder to countenance.  While Hoisington remains hopeful that currently existing international law and norms regarding the use of force and authorisation of military action in self-defense can ultimately be adapted to cover cyber-conflict, as things currently stand is not very clear what constitutes, among other things, acceptable military targets, proportional violence or the issue of "digital collateral damage".

As much of the distinction between warfare and terrorism rests on the legal authority, legitimacy and regulation that the former has under international law, this point raises a serious concern about how the ethics of cyberwarfare and cyber-terrorism are being deployed.  Given the pejorative connotations of terrorism, it is not unreasonable in the current circumstances to ask if cyber-terrorism is merely cyberwarfare one does not approve of.

Continuing on the theme of cyber-terrorism as a variant of cyberwarfare, an intriguing paper by Applegate points to a blurring of the lines, such as they are, between cyberwarfare and cyber-terrorism with the case of state supported "hacktivists" and cyber-militias5.  Applegate posits that a number of states are willing to use these unofficially supported groups because "they can potentially achieve their political objectives without the burden of attribution or the need to adhere to the Law of Armed Conflict."  He also points to certain flaws in currently existing international law with regard to cyberwarfare, flaws which would also be pertinent to any theory of cyber-terrorism.  As Applegate says, reinforcing Hoisington's earlier points, "[w]hile many militaries now treat the computer as a weapon's system, no international agreement or legal statute defines it as such." 

As a consequence of this, a critical part of the international legal code, those referring to "armed attack", are rendered null and void.  Applegate also echoes earlier concerns about the ethics of response, noting that attribution alone is a major issue on the internet, let alone proportionality.  There are also some worrying implications regarding legal combatants and prisoners of war – hackers as part of a military may be wearing a uniform and operate as part of a chain of command, but neither will be identifiable to their enemy, and "patriotic hackers" acting outside of the official chain of command but with state support could end up with a similar legal status to the "illegal combatants" of Guantanamo Bay – neither PoWs or criminal prisoners.

Thus the dividing line between cyber-terrorism and cyberwarfare is not at all clear, and may be being deliberately blurred by states wishing to avoid attribution for their attacks.  While considering cyber-terrorism as cyberwarfare by non-state actors is conceptually attractive and elegant on one level, and has a certain amount of legal support, given the current status of laws regarding cyber-conflict, on another level it is a troubling and problematic solution.

[LMNO]

Thanks for the excerpt! I didn't realize (but should have guessed) the rules surrounding cyber attacks/terrorism/warfare are so vague.

[Cain]

Yeah.  Computers aint weapons, so cyberattacks are not warfare, thus the wars of law do not apply. 

It's a clusterfuck waiting to happen.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Hmmm, that's really interesting. Especially in our current U.S. political climate of calling almost everything we don't like "terrorism". I'm actually waiting for protests to be relabeled "terrorism" so that protesters can simply be hauled off to prison and held indefinitely.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Uh, oh, my bossfessor wants me to edit the online class softwarez.  I am going to ignore it until tomorrow.

[Cain]

Uh, oh, my bossfessor wants me to edit the online class softwarez.  I am going to ignore it until tomorrow.

That sounds suspiciously like terrorism to me.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Uh, oh, my bossfessor wants me to edit the online class softwarez.  I am going to ignore it until tomorrow.

That sounds suspiciously like terrorism to me.

I am extremely reluctant to actually do it, because I'm supposed to be on vacation FFS.

[Cain]

I'm pretty sure academics mentally categorise holidays as "marking time", and don't realise other people actually use them to do other things.

Speaking of which, I'm coming to a deep appreciation of just how entirely fucked the Irish problem was as a result of my current paper.  I mean, to say the British government had no good options severely understates just how shit the choice of options that were actually available to it.  They also tried pretty much everything in NI in the existing counter-terrorism playbook of the time, with the only result being "sometimes, this shit worked, but only for a short time, and then it never does again".

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

"marking time" sounds like peeing on shit.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

First day of classes was today. I love my neuroscience professor! I had him last term as well. The best thing is that while neuropharmacology is formatted like a standard undergraduate class, neurophysiology II is a piggyback class and is also designed to be a taste of what we can expect from graduate school, so we're doing a raft of research (I'm doing mine on temporal lobe epilepsy and religious experiences) and there's no final. I'm so stoked! And I already like my genetics professor, she's rad.

I has a good feeling about this term.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Oh and one of the first things Dr. G said in Neuropharmacology is that most policymakers have little to no science training when it comes to drugs, which is why they're so hopelessly disconnected. Surprise surprise.

We get to visit the Primate Center, as well. ZOMG. He called it "Nine thousand monkeys behind Parr Lumber".

Nine thousand monkeys, you guys. NINE THOUSAND MONKEYS. AND ME.

[S]

NINE THOUSAND MONKEYS. AND ME.

That's really exciting stuff. I won't ever forget my murine myeloma cultures; I liked taking care of nine million cells a day. Studying biology was probably the only good decision I've ever made.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

NINE THOUSAND MONKEYS. AND ME.

That's really exciting stuff. I won't ever forget my murine myeloma cultures; I liked taking care of nine million cells a day. Studying biology was probably the only good decision I've ever made.

I don't really want to work with nonhuman primates, but still, that's a fuckton of monkeys.