Harinda Vidanage
Visiting Fulbright Scholar
St. Lawrence University
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
7:00pm
Griffiths 123
"Bioroid Century: Spectrum of Cyber Security and Its Illusions"
The talk attempts to highlight the implications of a lack of solutions for individual safety amidst a complicated maze of ideas, theories, discourses that are emerging around the concept of cyber security that primarily focuses on network security, hardware security, critical infrastructure security or achieving military edge. Cyber security remains much like cyberspace, with multiple narratives and analytical frameworks that unpack, bind and rebind concepts such as 'espionage', 'crime', 'terrorism' and 'war' with the cyber prefix, with no common consensus among academics, practitioners and policy makers. In the meantime the cumulative threat emanating from cyberspace makes individual users more and more vulnerable to external manipulations. Such manipulations are a significant feature in 'cyber power', spawn possibilities of transforming the Internet user into a perpetrator/weapon/bioroid against national security, reinforcing existing threats such as criminal enterprise, espionage, non-State terrorism, radicalization and home grown terror. ' The talk features the double sense of human vulnerability in cyberspace of self and to others.
Dr. Vidanage has served most recently as Academic and Research Director of the Colombo-based, Badaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS), Sri Lanka’s premier think tank for International Affairs. His recent scholarship includes “Rivalry in Cyberspace and Virtual Contours of a New Conflict Zone: The Sri-Lankan Case,” in Athina Karatzogiani (Ed.), Cyber-conflict and Global Politics (Contemporary Security Studies), Routledge, 2009. He recently completed designing the first E diploma program to be launched in Sri Lanka on the subject of “Information Technologies and Human Rights” He has been a researcher on cyber culture, cyber security and cyber politics for nearly a decade; his doctoral thesis at University of Edinburgh, UK, explored the impact of online political strategies and cyber conflict on the life of Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora political activists in London. His pioneering research on Cyber cafes and the formation of diaspora virtual communities in 2004, published on EPW, has been translated in a number of languages. Dr. Vidanage was an advisor to the Sri Lanka’s President on International Affairs during 2006- 2010. His research interests are primarily focused on Politics of the Internet, Robotics in Warfare and the geo political transformation of Indian Ocean politics.
