Instead of waiting for the state to act, a bottom-up army of cyber warriors should be created. They should stand side-by-side with the marching National Guard and paramilitary organizations. If the government can’t protect us from cyber aggression by China, Russia, and others, including non-state agents – as evidenced most recently by the theft of over 20 million classified files by Beijing’s hackers – a U.S. cyber militia and a cyber tea party should rally to the rescue.
Cyberspace is the Internet, i.e. an open, interdependent network, within which the convergence — symbiotic and parasitic — of any life forms, beyond traditional dimensions of human experience, takes place. The Internet is a “virtual environment” — as it was dubbed by Gen. Keith Alexander; the context for the convergence of all the hardware and software in the possession of individuals, companies, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — from the Red Cross to the Islamic State.
Rapidly growing cyberspace is “becoming more and more globalized, decentralized, accessible to billions of individuals as well as mostly free of regulations.” How to assemble cyberspace? Where to put it? How to relate to it? Our colleague from IWP, Michelle Watson Roscitt, called it the fifth geographic domain. Perhaps it would be better to call it the fifth geographic dimension? The traditional dimensions are land, sea, air, and space.