When sounding the alarm over cyberthreats, policymakers and analysts have typically employed a vocabulary of conflict and catastrophe. As early as 2001, James Adams, a co-founder of the cybersecurity firm iDefense, warned in these pages that cyberspace was “a new international battlefield,” where future military campaigns would be won or lost. In subsequent years, U.S. defense officials warned of a “cyber–Pearl Harbor,” in the words of then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and a “cyber 9/11,” according to then Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. In 2015, James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, said the United States must prepare for a “cyber Armageddon” but acknowledged it was not the most likely scenario. In response to the threat, officials argued that cyberspace should be understood as a “domain” of conflict, with “key terrain” that the United States needed to take or defend.
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