A British Perspective on Cyberwar

I was pleased to have been one of the other speakers at the event yesterday to which Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute refers to in his post, We Are Not at Cyberwar. Ian was charged with defining what we mean by the internet and cyberspace, which he very capably did via the slidedeck available on his blog and SlideShare.

Having addressed Mike McConnell’s recent fear-mongering, Ian writes:

Fortunately, for now, wiser voices are prevailing within the US government. President Obama’s cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt told Wired News: “There is no cyberwar. I think that is a terrible metaphor and I think that is a terrible concept.”

I tried to make my own contribution to sanity at a conference yesterday in London on this subject. I was pleased to hear widespread agreement within the audience with Schmidt’s position.

Is this another example of the argument I proposed a couple of weeks ago at Kings of War? Is there a trans-Atlantic difference in the way this issue has been portrayed?