Everything-as-a-hack

Abstract

In media and public discourse, cyber incidents are typically covered in terms of cybercriminals or other external threat agents managing to gain access to sensitive data and systems through weaknesses in technology and/or human factors. Such a framing of incidents foregrounds the (problematic) access claims of “hackers” and the protection against those as the key issue in security. However, other access claims play a role in the same incidents, such as those of the data owners, service providers, advertising companies, intelligence agencies, etc. These access claims are made via different means, and they are backgrounded when the problem is framed in terms of unauthorised access through hacks. In this contribution, I investigate the activity of claiming access as a key analytical concept in a more symmetrical treatment of cybersecurity and associated incidents. Rather than implicit, normalised, and technologically congealed notions of threats and associated access claims, this analytical framework aims at highlighting all access claims within the scope of a cybersecurity phenomenon, in order to uncover the politics behind cybersecurity and associated discourses and infrastructures, and thereby increase transparency. By covering different types of resources and different means of access, the approach also has the potential to connect the rather separated discourses on cybersecurity, privacy, and social manipulation through technology.