Gary McGraw and Ivan Arce wrote Cyber War Mongering and Influence Peddling, they inject notes of reality and pragmatism into the current "debate" that sorely lacks for both qualities.
To wit:
In 2010, ridiculous and dangerous stories of a Chinese mistake with BGP protocol management were hyped into some kind of malicious "hijacking" of 15% of US-based Internet Traffic. Not only were the actual traffic numbers in question inflated, misused, and stretched well past the breaking point, sadly the US Congress seems to be taking the story seriously. (For the real and much more boring numbers, see Arbor Network's analysis.) BGP is broken and needs to be fixed. Assigning malicious intent to mistakes using BGP is foolhardy and ignorant.
The sheer amount of uninformed misguided hyperbole made by people who could not tell a protocol from a bird in the sky is off the charts.
Should we be surprised? Not really, as Zach Karabell points out in Superfusion "While the public tenor was negative towards China, corporations were tripping over themselves to get in on the action." People get hung up on blowing hot air and miss the opportunities.
There is room for improvement in cyber policy, I would start by addressing a policy framework that described the Internet style issues similar to the framework that Tom Barnett and listed here in the People's Daily. The key thing is to describe the real tradeoffs and choices that must be made.
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