File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0403, message 92


Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 09:39:09 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Reinsborough: "Resistance to Information Warfare" (2)


In the early 1990s the government of Mexico was
pushing a variety of neoliberal economic policies in
the Chiapas region such as the elimination of ejido
collective land, the implementation of NAFTA, and poor
prices for campesino agriculture relative to corporate
agribusiness. All of these factored in the eventual
rebellion of tribal Chiapas, numbering among the
demands to the Mexican government. 

2.3 as seen from the United States 

The network of alliances from which the EZLN emerged
communicates in over 60 languages . This gives some
idea of how much the form of organization is what many
United States theorists of information warfare would
call a network. 

Back in the United States, the "netwar" concept that
had been articulated by Ronfeldt and Arquilla suddenly
became a big topic, Ronfeldt's work became a flurry of
discussion on the Internet in mid-March when Pacific
News Service correspondent Joel Simon wrote an article
about Ronfeldt's opinions on the influence of netwars
on the political situation in Mexico. According to
Simon, Ronfeldt holds that the work of social
activists on the Internet has had a large influence --
helping to coordinate the large demonstrations in
Mexico City in support of the Zapatistas and the
proliferation of EZLN communiqu_s across the world via
computer networks. 

After the Zapatista uprising, the military’s concept
of netwar was brought to the public as one way to
explain and interpret what might be happening. The
supposedly subdued left at that time in United States
politics were actually very active. According to
Ronfeldt, 

some of the heaviest users of the new communications
networks and technologies are progressive,
center-left, and social activists... [which work on]
human rights, peace, environmental, consumer, labor,
immigration, racial and gender-based issues. 

The revolution in ICTs has made it possible for more
disparate and smaller actors to build networks of
information and communication through which collective
action in disparate locations can be initiated. The
role of people like Ronfeldt is to locate the possible
lines of these changes, put intellectual labels on
them, and help focus the government response, a
response organized by the knowledge constructed in
this process. 

2.4 reaction

Government responses to grassroots democracy movements
have traditionally been quite negative. In the 1970s
Samuel Huntington, an academic at the Harvard
University Political Science Department, wrote about
an "excess of democracy" in a report commissioned for
the Trilateral Commission regarding the grassroots
upsurge of the late 1960s and early 1970s, suggesting
that journalism and other means that information are
distributed might be limited. 

Basically writing in reaction to the mobilization of
people normally isolated from the political process in
the 1960s, Huntington argued in 1975 that " some of
the problems of governance in the United States today
stem from an excess of democracy... Needed, instead,
is a greater degree of moderation of democracy." 

Journalists might be trained to better moderate this
excess. Means of free communication could be
moderated. A recent example of this is the 1993-4
proposed introduction of the "clipper chip, " a piece
of silicon technology, which enabled the U.S.
government to see all encrypted messages on the
internet. An emphasis on monitoring internet traffic
has been justified to some extent by emphasizing the
supposed presence of paedophiles (more widely thought
to be acceptable targets of scrutiny) on the internet.
However internet privacy activists continue to
confront attempts at greater surveillance of
cyberspace. 

Other responses to these movements in the United
States include the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s
notorious COINTEL program targeting civil rights,
women’s, environmental and indigenous activists with
misinformation, surveillance, disruption, and in
several instances assassination. The most recent
widely recognized example of this is the bombing of
Judi Bari and Daryl Cherney during the 1980s in a
Northern California conflict about the lumber economy.
These two environmental activists (with memberships in
both Earth First! and the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW)) helped build crucial links between the
environmental movement and the labour movement that
later proved an important part of challenging the 1998
attempted conference of the World Trade Organization
(WTO) in Seattle, Washington. The use of extra-legal
military action or support of paramilitary action by
the state is generally situated along the potential
fault lines of a neoliberal economic agenda. 

The response that Ronfeldt suggests is not simply
"moderation" of the opponent but to enter into
"netwar" with the opponent. 

To fight this, Ronfeldt maintains that the lesson is
clear: "institutions can be defeated by networks, and
it may take networks to counter networks." He argues
that if the U.S. government and/or military is to
fight this ideological war properly with the intent of
winning -- and he does specifically mention ideology
-- it must completely reorganize itself, scrapping
hierarchical organization for a more autonomous and
decentralized system: a network. In this way, he
states, "we expect that... netwar may be uniquely
suited to fighting non-state actors." 

To see how quickly the distance between
studying/writing about information-conflict (or what
the U.S. warfare theorists call "netwar") and
participating (either knowingly or naively) one might
examine the document posted openly at spunk.org and
entitled "Cyberspace and Ungovernability" in which
Harry Cleaver, one of the early cyber activists
spreading word about the uprising in Chiapas,
describes attempts by Ronfeldt (presumably deceitful
but also possibly naïve on his part) to engage with
him intellectually in the study of the "netwar"
phenomenon. This web-posting, originally an email, is
a clear example of the kind of relation building and
information sharing within a plane of common interests
that characterize grassroots organizing. Cleaver notes
for the people to whom he is communicating that
information gatherers allied with the military and
neoliberal economic regime have begun to collect (and
distribute) information on them. He then makes
suggestions for the most useful ways to collect and
analyse information on the information gatherers. It
demonstrates the engaged character of analysis within
political action networks. I will return to the
specifics of Cleaver’s response in the following
section where I argue for distinguishing between
"netwar" and what grassroots movements do, but in the
meantime, the warning for academics is to note that in
an information conflict our work is always situated
within the field of conflict. We are located,
situated, and we must choose not so much our "side"
(which would be a very narrow way to think about
conflict) as our relationship to the network of
interactions, a dynamic network of numerous actors,
positions, and possibilities. An academic builds
knowledge and is therefore always a player within the
information game. 

3.0 an argument for distinguishing information
conflict practices from information warfare 

But what has "netwar" to do with warfare. Is it really
an aspect of warfare and if so from who’s eyes is it
warfare? Is "netwar" really warfare, or is this
nomenclature an appropriation of the realm of
political discourse by the military by labeling it a
"security" issue? Conflicts that might be resolved
within the remit of civil society become the territory
of military organizations legitimized as agents of the
state. 

More generally the term "information warfare" has been
defined in so many ways as to make it almost
meaningless, internet fraud, bombing a military
com-centre, and telling your neighbour about what’s
happening in Mexico, have all been described as
information warfare. From a sociological perspective
the characterisation by metaphor of particular
activities as warfare is an important gesture. The
relationship of the social actor to the activities
characterized as such can potentially take on new
dimensions. The attached label of "warfare" glamorises
the activity and distorts our perspective. There may
also be other associated transfer of characteristics
of "warfare" to the activity. If "warfare" is
traditionally considered to be more the role of men
than of women will the activity then begin to generate
a similar gender skew in its participants? If the
discourse of "warfare" explains itself only in the
field of power, leaving no acknowledgement of a role
for diplomacy , negotiation, ordinary sentiment, or
the role of the body , then will the activity
described as "warfare" take on some of these
characteristics as well? 

The functioning of grassroots networks depends heavily
upon cooperation, negotiation, focus upon common
interests that parties share, and multiple relational
interactions that are not so much defined as
relational. The role of women in grassroots networks
is crucial. Often they are a large percentage of the
labour (too often in the form of "invisible work")
that sustains these networks. These networks might be
seriously compromised by a "militarization" or
"masculinization" of thinking, depriving them of some
of the fluid character that enables grassroots
organizing to be successful. 

The negation of enemies suggested in the discourse of
"warfare" is not precisely the role of a grassroots
movement or network. In particular caution can be
taken regarding how grassroots networks generate or
disable confrontation. Harry Cleaver regarding enemies
makes these comments:

We, or at least some of us, should keep a careful eye
on the activities and discussions of our enemies: HOW
they are monitoring us, WHO is monitoring us, what
they are SAYING about what we are doing, what
COUNTERMEASURES they are taking against what we are
doing. We need to do these things because even if we
do not want to view them as "enemies" many of them DO
view us as enemies and are proceeding accordingly.
Counterinsurgency professionals do this for a living
and they believe in it. 

The slippery and multiple use of the word enemy here
demonstrates a resistance to enmity as a mode of
social relationship imposed by capitalist relations. 

As far as those who are acting as intelligence
providers for institutions like the World Bank but do
not think of themselves as our enemies, perhaps even
feel they are on our side, well, we can certainly deal
with them individually as well-intentioned persons,
but it is still important to recognize and watch how
the institutions they are trying to influence actually
behaves in the light of the information it is
provided. The Bank in particular has demonstrated a
certain capacity for neutralizing some of its
opponents by internalizing them, i.e., giving them
jobs as professional curmudgeons within the Bank. We
need to watch these things to understand what
threatens us and how best to deal with it. 

It is an important task to distinguish between
information warfare (within the mode of resolving
conflict by violence) and information conflict
practices which are outside the mode of resolving
conflict through violence. Transforming the mode of
conflict to a medium in which one’s opponent has a
clear monopoly upon makes very little strategic sense.
The encroachment of the martial imagination into the
realm of civil political society (although not always
new) is undesirable for grassroots organization.
Martial thinking tends to analyse differences in power
at the ultimate unit: violence and thus forecloses
possibilities like trust or negotiation within
conflict or as a form of resolving conflict. 

The mode in which conflict is resolved often
determines the outcome. It is common for grassroots
activists to be sceptical that a solution generated by
use of violence will provide the basis for peaceful
community. 

3.2 alternative approach – bottom up information
warfare 

Distancing oneself from the idea of information
"warfare" in favour of a more general concept of
information conflict has not always been the approach
of all counter-hegemonic activists. However, almost
all of these people have in some way looked at
information conflict differently or called into
question the basic principles that are set up by the
establishment. 

One author calls for "bottom up information warfare,"
and the " negation of dominant
corporate-state/military-intelligence IW theory,"
which should be based on a close examination of the
sources of these dominant conceptions, the content and
main conclusions, the underlying assumptions and
myths, and the context from which IW theory was
produced. Primary sources for dominant IW
theory/praxis are U.S. academicians, scholars, and
analysts from places like the RAND Corporation, the
National Defence University, the U.S. Air Force, other
branches of the military, public and private
universities, and `independent` think-tanks. 

Many anarchist versions of info-war are influenced by
the 1970s writings of Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari
who posit the "nomadic war machine" as a primordial
form of resistance to hegemonic power. Other notable
resistance theorists are Peter Lamborn Wilson and
Hakim Bey whose concept of a Temporary Autonomous Zone
(TAZ) has been taken up widely. 

Even the term network has been challenged for its
cultural basis outside of the networks which (in the
example below) Harry Cleaver is writing about, 

Indeed, one term often used by the participants in
preference to "networks" --whose term "net" evokes
being caught-- is "hammock," the name of a widely
used, suspended sleeping device made from loosely
woven string that reforms itself according to the
needs (i.e., body shapes) of each user. These
networks, which have been developed to interlink
peasant and indigenous communities, not only connect
villages in the countryside but also reach into the
cities where neighbourhoods created by rural-urban
migrants retain close relations with their rural
points of origin. 

A.C. Hobbs' book, Locks and Safes: The Construction of
Locks, published in 1853, might offer (by negation) a
clue about where the resistant "theory" exists: 

A commercial, and in some respects a social doubt has
been started within the last year or two, whether or
not it is right to discuss so openly the security or
insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose
that the discussion respecting the means for baffling
the supposed safety of locks offers a premium for
dishonesty, by showing others how to be dishonest.
This is a fallacy. Rogues are very keen in their
profession, and know already much more than we can
teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery. 

Rogues knew a good deal about lock-picking long before
locksmiths discussed it among themselves, as they have
lately done. If a lock, let it have been made in
whatever country, or by whatever maker, is not so
inviolable as it has hitherto been deemed to be,
surely it is to the interest of honest persons to know
this fact, because the dishonest are tolerably certain
to apply the knowledge practically; and the spread of
the knowledge is necessary to give fair play to those
who might suffer by ignorance. 

It cannot be too earnestly urged that an acquaintance
with real facts will, in the end, be better for all
parties. 

This nineteenth century locksmith demonstrates why
hegemonic powers like the United States military and
their associated think tanks are quite interested to
talk about how information warfare might work to
unlock the secrets of their reign of neoliberal
authority. The counter hegemonic power in this story
is the rogue, who if she discovers a trick, is hardly
going to publicize it. 

4.0 conclusions 

Neoliberal economic policies (being broadly pushed by
institutions like the World Trade Organization at the
global level or the U.S. and Mexican governments at a
more regional and national level) create the
conditions for developing networks of resistance to
grow and to cooperate, in a decentralized and
effective manner. The Zapitista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN), although a particularly graphic
example of this process, is by no means unique, as
evidenced by the diverse solidarity from other social
groups who find themselves in a sympathetic situation.


The defence intelligencia of the US military
establishment are attempting to describe these modes
of conflict as a new form of warfare and hence arguing
to extend the logic of martial encounter into the
civil and political realm. Grassroots resistance to
this type of encroachment includes a sociological
caution about fetishizing martial exchange. For this
reason I have made a careful argument for being able
to distinguish between information conflict practices
and the more specific subset of these, information
warfare, which takes organized violence as its primary
unit of analysis. 

5.0 bibliographies 

Arquilla, John and David F. Ronfeldt "Cyber War Is
Coming" in Comparative Strategy, Vol. 12, p141-165
(1993) 

Arquilla, John and David F. Ronfeldt. "Cyberwar and
Netwar: New Modes, Old Concepts, of Conflict" at RAND.


Campen, Dearth & Goodden (eds) Cyberwar: Security,
Strategy and Conflict in the Information Age. AFCEA
International Press: Fairfax, Virginia (1996) 

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction
(CJCSI) Number 3210.01, dated 02 January 1996 

Cleaver, Harry "The Chiapas Uprising and the Future of
Class Struggle in the New World Order" (February,
1994) at gopher://mundo.eco.utexas.edu/00/hmcleaver 

Cleaver, Harry, "Cyberspace and ‘Ungovernability’" at
http://www.spunk.org/texts/comms/sp001000.html 

Grey, Chris Hables, Postmodern War: The New Politics
of Conflict. Routledge: London (1997) 

Ignatieff, Michael Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond.
Chatto & Windus: London (2000) 

Jessop, Bob. "Cyberwar" Unpublished Lecture Notes
(2003) 

Jessop, Bob. The Future of the Capitalist State
Blackwell: Oxford, Malden (2002) 

Kingsnorth, Paul. One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the
Heart of the Global Resistance Movement. Simon &
Schuster: London & Sydney 

De Landa, Manuel. War in the Age of Intelligent
Machines. Zone Books: Cambridge and London (1991) 

Libicki, Martin 

May, Todd. The Political Philosophy of
Poststructuralist Anarchism Pennsylvania State
University Press: University Park (1994) 

Morton, Adam. "La Resurrección del Maíz": Some Aspects
of Globalisation, Resistance and the Zapatista
Question http://www.isanet.org/archive/morton.html 

Ronfeldt, David F. & John Arquilla, Graham Fuller,
Melissa Fuller The Zapatista "Social Netwar" in
Mexico, RAND publications (1998) 

Scarry, Elaine. Chapter 3: "War" in The Body in Pain:
The Making and Unmaking of the World (1987) 

Schwartau Winn, Information Warfare, Chaos on the
electronic superhighway, (Thunder’s mounth press 1994)
http://www.infowar.com/freednlds/Chaos_IW1.zip 

Toffler, Heidi & Alvin, Third Wave Bantam Books (1991)


Tzu, Sun The Art of War 

Wehling, Jason "Netwars and Activists Power on the
Internet"
http://www.spunk.org/library/comms/sp001518/Netwars.html




===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the 
        mania
     Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way."

- Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799

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