Phreak the Speak: The Flawed Communications within Cyber Intelligentsia

This work will examine a fundamental dichotomy that has developed within the academic, technical and policy communities when it comes to understanding, advancing, and communicating work on cyberspace within global affairs. This distinct tendency today has technical cyber scholarship partially blind and deaf to important political ramifications while political cyber work remains partially illiterate and mute on cyberspace’s technical complexity. This dichotomy not only exists as an intellectual barrier between scholars of the hard and social sciences, it impinges on progressive cooperation between the political and technical communities. Consequently, there is a gap weakening the scope and reach of theoretical and empirical work on cyberspace in general. Indeed, this problem has the potential to become exponentially larger in the immediate future: not only are real-world professionals and scholars having trouble building bridges between obvious mutual interests, but this ‘Chinese knowledge wall’ separates each group respectively. For example, IT experts and policymakers have communication/shared knowledge problems just as computer and political scientists have not yet found true common ground for amalgamated work. The work will address these problems, specifically applying them to the intelligence, diplomatic, and military communities to show how they are not just intellectual riddles but could easily facilitate future crises in important areas of international relations. In this piece an ultimate potential danger is revealed, where the failure to unite the diverse insights of scholars and practitioners alike will result not only in poor prognostication and limited analysis but also possibly engender greater real-world conflict. Just as phreaking involves a subculture of specialists who experiment and toy with telecommunication systems, the intellectual, technical, and governmental worlds need a new generation of ‘phreak-scholars’ who are adept at building connections between these diverse, inter-related knowledge bases.