The prospect of hearing from Anna Engelhardt about her work on cyber warfare has been a highly anticipated presentation, and she did not disappoint. First of all, it would be remiss of me to not mention Anna’s intriguing profile visuals, where she appears as a glittering, disembodied head which served to unsettle and disrupt ideas of normativity before she’d even started speaking.
When she did, she started by explaining the title of her talk. The volumes she refers to are both physical and digital which she will explain the differences and similarities between them. The spectral comes from their elusive nature, and the physical from the electromagnetic spectrum it relies upon to operate. The forms of territoriality of cyberspace are therefore both necessarily artificial, but also very much grounded. She compared how it has become necessary to dominate the spaces distributed vertically, among which one can find cyberspace. She showed an image of a Russian flag being planted on the ground under the North Pole by robots, using it as an example of such connection between offline and online territories.
In describing the impact of such acts, making the space of the digital is therefore similar to colonial terraforming, where land is created rather than claimed by a country, such as in Dubai where sand islands were created for hotels. For Engelhardt, the creation of boundaries in cyberspace is stuck between a military perception of nation states with clean cut borders, and borderless imaginaries of the web. This creates a friction between mapped boundaries, and claimed boundaries of cyberspace.
Cyberattacks are susceptible to this nation border/borderless impasse. She explained further how the dichotomy in metaphors of space functions by referring to the Matrix, where Neo enters a battle space, and can access any point of the Matrix via a magical ‘backdoor’. She opposes such a frictionless acess to all parts of cyberspace from one magic corridor to queer TikTok from @thaddeushafer, which embodies a lengthy trip through various rooms in cyberspace.
She asked us to examine what the difference is, between thinking about the spatial nature of cyberspace digitally, and what would be the spatial nature of the service based on the infrastructure. This raises issues that have been around for a long time, about how cyberspace is or is not seen as equal to the electric range of cyberspace, or equal to the optic fibre cables. She referred to books by Lisa Parks on Cultures in Orbit, and Nicole Starosielski on The Undersea Network which talk about the physical infrastructures.
Anna’s approach is to think about cyberspace spatially to ease the unhelpful militaristic diagrammatic representations of it, which often do not represent realistically the difference between cyberwarfare and electronic warfare. She described electronic warfare as weaponsing the satellite frequencies that are open to the public, to disrupt functions that remote technologies allow us to perform. One example she referred to is the use of transportable cellular towers, also known as stingrays or IMSI catchers, used by police to spy on people by accessing the cellular data being used. Russia is one example where this technique has been used for many years, including during the first and second wars in Chechnya, for hacking communication messages for example, and surveillance. More recently, GPS “spoofing” devices have been used to disrupt surveillance, and send incorrect GPS locations to protect the real ones. Bringing us right up to date, she referred to DOXA Journal editors that are under house arrest in Moscow. The electronic bracelets they are issued are described as replacing imprisonment, and offer the police an additional opportunity to surveil, with the locational alerts notifying them if they leave their designated area.
In closing, she referred to the different consequences of cyberwar, describing how the repercussions for cyber-attacks on infrastructure would be much harsher than in cyberspace, such as GPS-spoofing for example.