Symposium on Cybersecurity and the Changing International Law of Data Generative Security: Adversarial Design and Conflict of Laws

The data breach of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the U.S. presidential election of 2016 is multi-faceted and has wide ranging implications. The discourse of “cybersecurity” is increasingly thought of through the lens of states and other powerful actors like large corporations, as a conflict or war that is waged by specialized combatants while civilians are relegated to the sidelines and are the victims of digital malfeasance or the object of regulation and education from those in power.1 This essay opts instead for a ground-up view using concepts of participatory, adversarial design and hybrid knowledge production from the field of science and technology studies (STS) to argue for a serious consideration of nonhegemonic configurations of knowledge and power as a source for novel and creative contributions to some of the challenges faced in global cybersecurity. The inquiry begins with one discrete example of a technological artifact adopted as a response to the DNC data breach and uses this case to advocate both for a legal climate that fosters generative production of technologies from civil society and for an analogous generative jurisprudence to address questions of cybersecurity that adapts “hacker values” through techniques of private international law.2