thesis

Conclusion 273
running Internet to useful agents that may voluntarily provide public services as
long as they fit into overall governmental security strategies.
Studying Internet security now requires that we revisit aspects of international
relations. True, there are a number of aspects of Internet security in the areas of
cybercrime and infrastructural security that do not raise national security concerns.
But as the Internet has become a means, and an object of, vulnerabilities for national
security interests, Internet security governance faces the same global governance
and institutional issues that traditional security has.
Known for texts usually as dense and legible as the obfuscated JavaScript files of
Google’s (or Twitter’s or Facebook’s…) web applications, Immanuel Kant sardonically
summed up the roots of the security problem of the human species: they are a
“group of persons who can’t do without peaceful togetherness and yet can’t help
but constantly loathe one another” (Kant 1796/2008, pp. 331; translation by author).
The solution the saddler’s son proposed in the late 18 th century was to follow
the guiding principle of the idea of a cosmopolitan society, in which citizens set up
their rules and mutually ensure the following of these rules (1796/2008, p. 331).
Apparently, Kant’s approach to overcoming the security problem was to globalise
civic rationality and reason, and thereby both globalise the civic ideals and set the
precondition for a civil society (Richter 1992, pp. 37-55).
The Internet security community arguably produces security in a way that manages
to bring together reason and globality. In the cases analysed in this study, the
community re-established the Internet’s functionality and thereby provided security
as a global public good. The cases exemplified what could be described as technological
cosmopolitanism. The point of reference, in security studies lingo: the security
object for the Internet security community is not humanity in its direct sense,
but the borderless, global Internet and its functionality as a technical artefact. The
Conficker response showed a stunning global collaborative effort to contain the
risks that were inherent in this tremendous botnet, mostly irrespective of conflicts
between the countries of some participants. The Estonian cyberattacks have probably
been the first incident in the history of nation states in which a Minister of
Defence stated that his country was under attack and that a national security situation
existed, and yet the military had no role whatsoever in defending the country
from such an attack.
Students of international relations and political theory have long been haunted by
the question of how to establish, create, and eventually protect the values of democratic,
liberal societies in ways that do not endanger their civil pillars and that do
not run afoul of their societies' humanistic values. In his book on the “Dissolution