Engaging the limits of visibility: Photography, security and surveillance

Andersen, Rune; Möller, Frank

doi:10.1177/0967010613484955

Cited by 36 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…For cybersecurity, the first crucial question is to what extent practices that are, in Andersen and Möller's (2013) terms, "at the limit of visibility" can be incorporated into visual analyses. Due to its relative novelty and digital basis, many concepts and objects in cybersecurity have no obvious visual association, and so even though images are used powerfully in other security domains to frame issues in certain ways, the scope for doing so in cybersecurity is much wider.…”

Section: Visual Styles and Imagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cyber-noir: Cybersecurity and popular culture

Shires

2019

Contemporary Security Policy

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Cybersecurity experts foster a perception of cybersecurity as a gloomy underworld in which the good guys must resort to unconventional tactics to keep at bay a motley group of threats to the digital safety of unsuspecting individuals, businesses, and governments. This article takes this framing seriously, drawing on film studies scholarship that identifies certain aesthetic themes as associated with moral ambiguity in noir films. This article introduces the term "cyber-noir" to describe the incorporation of noir elements in cybersecurity expert discourses. It argues that the concept of cyber-noir helps explain the persistence of practices that blur legal, moral, and professional lines between legitimate and malicious activity in cyberspace. Consequently, changing cybersecurity requires not only institutional and technological measures, but also a re-constitution of cybersecurity identities themselves. KEYWORDS Cybersecurity; popular culture; film; threat intelligence; noir; narrative Dark Trace. Digital Shadows. Dark Cubed. Carbon Black. Dark Matter. Many emerging companies in the cybersecurity industry deliberately play on the popular perception of cybersecurity as a nether region, a gloomy underworld in which the good guys must resort to unconventional tactics to keep at bay a motley group of threats to the digital safety of unsuspecting individuals, businesses, and governments. These purveyors of what might be called "cyber-noir"-defined as the incorporation of noir aesthetics and themes into expert cybersecurity discourses-are often dismissed in International Relations (IR) as a mere sideshow, a footnote to more comfortable state-based dynamics. This article does the opposite. It takes the branding of the cybersecurity industry seriously, asking why these companies seek to portray liminality, transgression, and tantalizing opacity. Is it, as a (relatively) viral video of Michael Sulmeyer, former Director of Harvard Kennedy School's Cybersecurity Project, put it,

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Section: Visual Styles and Imagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cyber-noir: Cybersecurity and popular culture

Shires

2019

Contemporary Security Policy

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“…William Mitchell (2011) has argued that threatening phenomena that cannot be seen is more powerful than that which can be seen, on the basis that these kinds of unseen threats possess greater potential to activate the imagination (see also Andersen and Moller 2013). To elucidate this point, consider the example of a horror film, in which representational codes render the threat comprehensible as a result of its status as being hidden.…”

Section: Understanding Violence In Fibre-optic Cablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Terror from behind the keyboard: conceptualising faceless detractors and guarantors of security in cyberspace

Mott

2016

Critical Studies on Terrorism

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By reflecting on active public-domain government documents and statements, this article seeks to develop securitisation theory's articulation of the dichotomy between legitimate and illegitimate violence as it is reflected in British government policy. This dichotomy has (re)developed through a process wherein GCHQ and MI5 are portrayed as 'faceless guarantors' of security, in Manichean juxtaposition to the discursivelycreated phantom cyberterrorists, who are presented as 'faceless detractors' of security. It has previously been stated that the terrorism discourse associated with the present 'War on Terror' is attributed, in part, to mechanics of fantasy. I argue that, within the securitised discourse of cyberterrorism, the limits of fantasy possesses a murky nuance, which in turn, allows for a deeper -or at least more entrenched -securitisation. The official discourse surrounding the intelligence services' online surveillance apparatus operates with a similar opaque quality, but this is upheld by securitising actors as a strength to be maintained. Keywords: cyberterrorism, securitisation theory IntroductionThe term 'cyberterrorism' was first coined by Barry Collin in the 1980s (Brickey 2012), and has become a 'buzzword' not just in terrorism studies and cyber-security circles, but also -recognising cyberterror's prowess for eye-catching copy -within the media (Weimann 2005, 131;Gordon and Ford 2002; Jones 2005, 7). This media-friendly characteristic has perhaps encouraged a propensity to conflate cyberterrorism with hacking and cyberattacks more broadly (Taliharm 2010, 62-63), which has applied weight to the need for common conceptual understanding. Denning's testimony before the United States Congress' House Armed Services Committee offers one definition of the term. Accordingly, she stated that:"Cyberterrorism is the convergence of cyberspace and terrorism. It refers to unlawful attacks and threats of attacks against computers, networks and the information stored therein when done to intimidate or coerce a government or its people in furtherance of political or social objectives". Crucially, "to qualify as cyberterrorism, an attack should result in violence against persons or property, or at least cause enough harm to generate fear" (Denning 2000).Hua and Bapna offer a similar definition, stressing the role of 'significance' in the scale of the attack, and the inducement of physical violence or the creation of panic (2012, 176). A clause for cyberterrorism appears in British law in the 2000 Terrorism Act, under which Section (2)(e) detailed attacks "designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system" (National Archives 2000, 1); a clause that, Clive Walker contends, distinguished the dichotomy between 'costly nuisances' and bona fide 'cyberterrorism ' (2006, 632).Given the dearth of a cyberterrorist attack up to the point of writing, cyberterrorism can be considered to be a phenomenon that has been talked into existence (Conway 2005). Regardless, in the UK, cyberterrorism is arg...

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“…Still, in/visibility implicitly affects the way in which scholars apprehend surveillance technologies and practices: most of their attention rests indeed on what is exposed and securitised (Bigo 2014;Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2010;Zureik and Salter 2005). Critical security studies, nevertheless, also provides useful insights about the fascination of security policies for the production of visibilities (Amoore 2007), alternative forms of visibility as a critique of security representations (Andersen and Möller 2013) or the crucial, and often unnoticed, contribution of mundane and material elements in the securitisation process (Huysmans 2011).…”

Section: Articlementioning

confidence: 99%

Nurturing Ob-Scene Politics: Surveillance Practices Between In/Visibilities and Disappearances

Fuster

Bellanova

Gellert

2015

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Moving away from the traditional framing of surveillance in terms of in/visibility, this article proposes a conceptual journey that investigates the potential of the notions of dis-appearance and ob-scene as alternative theoretical tools. In particular, it explores how these different perspectives can help bringing politics back into the study and the critique of surveillance.Visibility is structurally linked to invisibility, and together they configure the different modes of in/visibility allowing for the very functioning of surveillance. However, the in/visibility dyad rather than merely describe surveillance contributes to its operations and stabilisation. In order to better understand and unpack surveillance it is thus necessary to tackle its practices not only in search of who watches whom, or what, but also by studying what is concealed through in/visibility, through both hiding and exposing, and what is left out of the scene (or being pushed away) in these processes.In a dialogue with surveillance and critical security studies, this contribution examines the disappearance of bodies in the deployment of security scanners and post-Snowden developments to illustrate the productivity of dis-appearance and the emergence of surveillance’s ob-scene. Against this background, the paper argues that through the lens of the ob-scene it is possible to grasp surveillance’s ripples, and open up their political discussion.

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Engaging the limits of visibility: Photography, security and surveillance

Cited by 36 publications

References 30 publications

Cyber-noir: Cybersecurity and popular culture

Cyber-noir: Cybersecurity and popular culture

Terror from behind the keyboard: conceptualising faceless detractors and guarantors of security in cyberspace

Nurturing Ob-Scene Politics: Surveillance Practices Between In/Visibilities and Disappearances

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