This article seeks to discuss two key challenges in the area of cyber-resilience. First, it asks: who owns UK cyber-resilience? Some 80 per cent of the UK's critical national infrastructure is in private hands and the last decade has seen efforts to legislate away some of the problem of resilience by creating legal duties for service providers. This has contributed to a new ecology for intelligence, security and resilience consisting of complex state-private citizen partnerships. However, it is unlikely that populations will accept this approach to riskshifting when systems fail. Second, it considers what constitutes genuinely robust cyber-defence after the Stuxnet event of 2010. Arguably, any system that depends on information technology, however well protected, is now vulnerable. There is a dawning realisation that the best technical solutions offer only partial assurance. Paradoxically, in an era when the Internet seems ubiquitous, a mixture of analogue and manual systems -often called systems diversity -offers a solution. However, mixed or diverse systems are a declining legacy and not the result of design. We close by discussing the immense challenges that the growing prevalence of electronic systems will bring.Cyber-events reverberate upon national resilience with increasing frequency. The cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, the WikiLeaks release of State Department cables in 2010, the Stuxnet attack on the Iranian nuclear programme during the same year and the interplay between social media and the recent 'Arab Spring' all underline both the growing importance of 'cyber' as a concept for international security and its complexity. However cyber is defined, it looms large in the current UK National Security Strategy, driven by anxieties about risk and resilience. Cyber-attacks are considered a Tier One threat; in other words they are among the four risks that the UK National Security Council considers the highest priority (UK Cabinet Office, 2010b, p. 27).This article examines the future landscape of UK cyber-resilience. 1 It argues that in the electronic realm, intelligence, security, risk and resilience have hybridised. In the short term, this presents an already familiar problem of governance within the UK system, both in terms of ownership and also of public-private co-operation. Britain's national technical authority for information assurance is the Communications-Electronics Security Group based in Cheltenham. This is part of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the UK's largest intelligence agency. An obvious problem is that some of the hitherto most secret parts of the state now need to be connected to some of the most public. Moreover, there are a bewildering number of stakeholders both in and outside government. No one knows how the increasingly complex ecology of cyberspace should be governed or who should own it.In the medium term, the problems are of a different order. It is an established orthodoxy among information security specialists that the main impediment to system security is huma...

This article considers the importance of Al‐Qaeda and Pakistan in driving British Islamic extremist terrorism during the past decade. Between 2003 and 2013, almost 50 British‐born Muslims engaged in multiple high‐profile terrorism conspiracies. All were designed to kill or seriously injure British citizens. Drawing on recently obtained court transcripts which offer remarkable detail, these plots are analysed from the point of view of radicalization, finance, training and operational direction. The emergence of extremist terrorism in the UK has its genesis within the Islamic fundamentalist movement, a socio‐political ideology that arrived in London in the early 1990s. Contrary to the prevailing discourse, members of the movement constitute a far from homogenous set of individuals. Based on age, overseas connections, experience of conflict and religiosity, they each fulfill diverse tasks that range from preaching and fundraising to facilitating combative jihad. A minority adopted an extremist position that led them to carry out acts of terrorism. Since 2006, the role of Al‐Qaeda and Pakistan in relation to this process has steadily declined. For the past seven years British Islamic extremists have pursued terrorism in whatever way they can on their own, with little or any direct support or influence from overseas. The security agencies are now asking how far current events in Syria will overturn this state of affairs.

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Britain has long taken a firm public line against terrorist ransom, insisting that yielding to terrorist demands only encourages further acts of intimidation and kidnapping. Hitherto, academic research has tended to take these assertions of piety at face value. This article uses a historical approach to show that the British position has shifted over time and was often more complex and pragmatic. Indeed, Britain’s position with regard to kidnap and ransom insurance has, until quite recently, been rather ambiguous. We use the British case to suggest that, rather than dividing states into groups that make concessions and those that do not, it is perhaps better to recognise there is often a broad spectrum of positions, sometimes held by different parts of the same government, together with the private security companies that move in the shadows on their behalf. One of the few things that unites them is a tendency to dissemble and this presents some intriguing methods problems for researchers.

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