How Different Stakeholders Frame Security

Josephine Wolff examines different Internet governance stakeholders and how they frame security debates.

Her conclusion:

The tensions that arise around issues of security among different groups of internet governance stakeholders speak to the many tangled notions of what online security is and whom it is meant to protect that are espoused by the participants in multistakeholder governance forums. What makes these debates significant and unique in the context of internet governance is not that the different stakeholders often disagree (indeed, that is a common occurrence), but rather that they disagree while all using the same vocabulary of security to support their respective stances. Government stakeholders advocate for limitations on WHOIS privacy/proxy services in order to aid law enforcement and protect their citizens from crime and fraud. Civil society stakeholders advocate against those limitations in order to aid activists and minorities and protect those online users from harassment. Both sides would claim that their position promotes a more secure internet and a more secure society -- ­and in a sense, both would be right, except that each promotes a differently secure internet and society, protecting different classes of people and behaviour from different threats.

While vague notions of security may be sufficiently universally accepted as to appear in official documents and treaties, the specific details of individual decisions­ -- such as the implementation of dotless domains, changes to the WHOIS database privacy policy, and proposals to grant government greater authority over how their internet traffic is routed­ -- require stakeholders to disentangle the many different ideas embedded in that language. For the idea of security to truly foster cooperation and collaboration as a boundary object in internet governance circles, the participating stakeholders will have to more concretely agree on what their vision of a secure internet is and how it will balance the different ideas of security espoused by different groups. Alternatively, internet governance stakeholders may find it more useful to limit their discussions on security, as a whole, and try to force their discussions to focus on more specific threats and issues within that space as a means of preventing themselves from succumbing to a façade of agreement without grappling with the sources of disagreement that linger just below the surface.

The intersection of multistakeholder internet governance and definitional issues of security is striking because of the way that the multistakeholder model both reinforces and takes advantage of the ambiguity surrounding the idea of security explored in the security studies literature. That ambiguity is a crucial component of maintaining a functional multistakeholder model of governance because it lends itself well to high-level agreements and discussions, contributing to the sense of consensus building across stakeholders. At the same time, gathering those different stakeholders together to decide specific issues related to the internet and its infrastructure brings to a fore the vast variety of definitions of security they employ and forces them to engage in security-versus-security fights, with each trying to promote their own particular notion of security. Security has long been a contested concept, but rarely do these contestations play out as directly and dramatically as in the multistakeholder arena of internet governance, where all parties are able to face off on what really constitutes security in a digital world.

We certainly saw this in the "going dark" debate: e.g. the FBI vs. Apple and their iPhone security.

from How Different Stakeholders Frame Security