Cybersecurity and the Age of Privateering

The chapter explores a different and necessary way of reducing cyber threats—curtailing the operations of hostile private actors that operate as proxies of states or with state toleration. The analogy here is to naval privateering between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Written by Florian Egloff of the Cyber Studies Programme at the University of Oxford, “Cybersecurity and the Age of Privateering” chronicles how governments commissioned privately owned vessels in wartime to operate against their adversaries’ trade and in peacetime to attack merchants’ ships in reprisal for harms attributed to a nation and to capture goods of equal value. Analogies to the cyber domain abound here. Several states recently have used or allowed hackers and criminal organizations to conduct cybercrime and cyber-enabled espionage against adversarial states and economic interests. This practice is analogous to privateering and piracy. Meanwhile, if a state lacks the capacity to defend the cyber domain and obtain redress for harmful cyber activities, then the users are largely left to protect themselves. Naturally, private companies, like the earlier naval merchants, are now debating with governments the advisability of issuing letters of marque that would allow companies to counterattack against cyberespionage and theft. Of course, as Egloff discusses, the myriad state and non-state actors and interests at play in the cyber domain, and the pace of technological change, mean that ordering this space will be exceptionally difficult and will take considerable time. He offers a thought-provoking framework for understanding differences and similarities in the naval and cyber domains and how this understanding could inform efforts to secure cyberspace.