Privatizing Political Authority: Cybersecurity, Public-Private Partnerships, and the Reproduction of Liberal Political Order

Daniel R Mccarthy

doi:10.17645/pag.v6i2.1335

Abstract

Cybersecurity sits at the intersection of public security concerns about critical infrastructure protection and private security concerns around the protection of property rights and civil liberties. Public-private partnerships have been embraced as the best way to meet the challenge of cybersecurity, enabling cooperation between private and public sectors to meet shared challenges. While the cybersecurity literature has focused on the practical dilemmas of providing a public good, it has been less effective in reflecting on the role of cybersecurity in the broader constitution of political order. Unpacking three accepted conceptual divisions between public and private, state and market, and the political and economic, it is possible to locate how this set of theoretical assumptions shortcut reflection on these larger issues. While public-private partnerships overstep boundaries between public authority and private right, in doing so they reconstitute these divisions at another level in the organization of political economy of liberal democratic societies.

Highlights

The politics of infrastructure are central to the governance of modern societies
In Booth’s (2007, p. 155) terms, ‘Deepening, means understanding security as an epiphenomenon, and so accepting the task of drilling down to explore its origins in the most basic question of political theory’. Drilling down in this context requires that we examine the fundamental assumptions about politics as they exist in the literature on private partnerships (PPPs) in cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection
The central point is that, while cybersecurity PPPs blur the public-private distinction at the level of security provision, they seek to maintain this in the wider political order

Summary

Introduction

The politics of infrastructure are central to the governance of modern societies. Large Technical Systems (LTS) shape all aspects of our everyday lives, in ways both visible and hidden. The central point is that, while cybersecurity PPPs blur the public-private distinction at the level of security provision, they seek to maintain this in the wider political order They represent one political strategy to solve the problem of cybersecurity, shaped by the liberal form of the state and liberal social forces.. Cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection policies aim to reproduce the process of ‘class-biased technological change’ (Kristal, 2013), designed to protect intellectual property and to enable market-led technological innovation The provision of this public good secures and reproduces the unequal distribution of income in American society based upon property ownership. That cybersecurity is a public good does not mean its benefits are distributed; this is not what liberal cybersecurity is for

Cybersecurity and the Privatization of Political Power

Findings

Conclusion