After a few intense days, in which I had to pause my #latamreports series —which I won't be able to resume until Monday—, I can finally contribute content here again. I have been fully engaged in updating the design of my doctoral research, and on that theoretical path, I propose to exchange.
The program in which I am involved is called Social Studies of Science and Technology, which is the equivalent of what the literature in Europe and the United States calls Science and Technology Studies or Science, Technology, and Society (STS in both cases). There are also variations in Europe where the discipline is also recognized as European Studies of Society, Science, and Technology (ESST).
We are talking about a field with an impressive academic and scientific life, and which in Cuba is part of undergraduate and graduate education. For example, anyone who is on the way to becoming a Doctor of Science here will need to pass an exercise related to this field. This doctoral training program that I am referring to started amid the Covid pandemic in 2021, but precisely for that reason, it was only last year that we had our first face-to-face session.
The topic in which I specialize as a researcher, for a few years now, is, in general, the relations between Cuba and the United States, and within it the use of technologies as instruments of the U.S. policy of regime change. The impact that the Internet and social networks in particular have had on the recent development of political or information warfare is a research topic that already has a history and intense contemporary literature. So let's briefly go through it.
"U.S. information warfare on Cuba" / Deep Dream Generator.
We need a deep dive
The list of contributions is almost endless, and I only refer to a small sample (that which I have already been able to "curate") when I relate the work of Nathaniel Greenberg with his How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring, Lennart Maschmeyer with his text The Subversive Trilemma (Why Cyber Operations Fall Short of Expectations), or the chapter written by Dighton (Mac) Fiddner —Cyberspace's ontological implications for national security— for the book Technology, Ethics and the Protocols of Modern War, edited by Artur Gruszczak and Paweł Frankowski.
Authors Thomas Paterson and Lauren Hanley observe in their article Political warfare in the digital age: cyber subversion, information operations and 'deep fakes', that the technologies and tools of cyberspace are making political warfare more penetrative and successful, because they have enabled their agents to have direct access to the target audience, and in the process conceal their involvement.
Fiddner, who is an American author, stresses that cyberspace is a human-made global strategic domain, a dimension of national power, and an instrument of national power within the information environment, consisting of infrastructures that include the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers for the production and use of information by individuals and organizations. He also tells us that it's a medium characterized by stealth, cover for plausible deniability —in the execution of cyber operations—, and the prevalence of accusations and suspicions over evidence and knowledge (post-truth), with an impact on high-level political decision-making and strategic and security planning.
I stopped with these authors because I did not have time to explore further, but I feel that they provided me with the necessary elements to address the phenomenon that is the basis of my research.
Cybersecurity and the STS field
This crude characterization of cyberspace is a concrete extrapolation of the critical vision born from STS studies about scientific and technological development, which is materialized in phenomena such as the Internet or social networks. Science and technology are analyzed as inherently human activities and, therefore, loaded with values, which are always approached and understood cognitively. This is how heavyweights in this field such as Stephen H. Cutcliffe put it straight.
States, it seems to me, have the imperative to protect that segment of cyberspace over which they have jurisdiction: their information ecosystems. This is where a key concept must come into play, a concept that can be plucked (just for the sake of analysis) from the leafy tree of security studies: cybersecurity. The definition varies according to each country, agent, and urgency. In Cuba, for example, is conceptualized as a state reached through a set of organizational, legal, educational, technical, political, and even diplomatic measures to guarantee the protection and legal use of cyberspace. I feel comfortable with it.
Research on this subject tends to focus on vulnerabilities in software and hardware that can be exploited as part of a cyber operation. This is according to a study by the prolific Swiss author Myriam Dunn Cavelty, who in any case also found that, within the view that integrates social interaction into the analysis of technology (in line with the STS view), cyber warfare is one of the two main focuses.
In the article Cyber security meets security politics: Complex technology, fragmented politics, and networked science, co-authored with fellow Swiss Andreas Wenger, Dunn argues that STS studies offer productive lenses for understanding the mutual interrelationship between the technical and socio-political spheres to address the opacity of cyber operations. In their view, such a connection can shed light on how states' cybersecurity policies and practices are facilitated or thwarted by the interests and practices of actors who are not readily visible, inside and outside governments.
Landing the problem in Cuba
Returning to Cuba, for reasons well founded in history and contemporary political development, cybersecurity has become an issue to which the country's authorities have devoted time and effort, translated into declarations, discussion forums, clarification of the regulatory framework, and concrete actions. The legal scenario, for example, shows solidity with the introduction of recent regulations that essentially aim at the development of cybersecurity.
I have already introduced here the U.S. regime change program towards Cuba, which has the use of ICT as a critical stake. So the domain of the proposal for my doctoral research conceives an intersection between the study of the use of ICT and particularly the Internet and social networks as means and spaces to advance any process of subversion or political warfare, studies on cybersecurity policies, and the STS approach.
Based on the call I referred to above by Dunn and Wenger, extrapolated to the US-Cuba conflict in the digital realm, I intend my research to cover the following question: how effectively does the Cuban State's regulatory policy on cybersecurity respond to the US government's regime change strategy oriented to the use of ICT?
I will be giving an exhaustive description of how this regime change program is operating through the use of technologies, a very obscure path for the researcher due to issues that I have addressed in other works here, to then see to what extent the cybersecurity regulatory policy, and the practice in some of its dimensions, can effectively face this type of sui generis policy, which doesn't attack the hardware or software of a computer, but reaches freely and in a certain way unstoppably to the mobile devices of any Cuban citizen.
Cybersecurity is somehow easier from the first dimension, the dominant one in the literature, where technology is seen as mere objects to be protected. In the Cuban case, the question is: what to do when the attack is happening every day, in full view of everyone?
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I see two ways out theoretically for this approach I intend to make: either I can extrapolate to the Cuban context a robust model of cybersecurity policy that understands the specificity of the U.S. strategy, or I will have to build that model. There are philosophical and sociological components, to begin with, that I'm very interested in addressing.
This is the current picture of my research, a process that I understand is always susceptible to changes, twists, and turns, although I feel good with its definition to the extent that the literature related to the subject is abundant —in encyclopedias, books, and articles of the highest level— and I have already recovered most of it.
I would like to interact with members of the community and Hive in general who have researched in any of the directions referred to here, and receive their criticisms and suggestions about the logic I intend to follow. It's always a pleasure for me to come back and share in our community. Have a nice weekend.