Cyber Conflict: Competing National Perspectives

Chapter 7Singapore's Encounter with Information Warfare: Filtering Electronic Globalization and Military Enhancements ¹

 

 

 

The Singaporean approach to information warfare is best framed in terms of the language of an encounter. It is a phenomenon introduced from outside its sovereign borders. Moreover, informational threats are wholly unconventional ones that cannot be effectively tackled by a standard authoritarian combination of legal sanction and policing. Given these unplanned and unpremeditated features, as of 2011–2012 the Singaporean official response to informational threats tracks the tentative reactions made by governments elsewhere.

In Singapore's case, the authorities have had to reconcile Singapore's capitalist hub status with some form of a pre-emptive defense. The latter description is probably oxymoronic and shrouded in secrecy given its fledgling status as a national security concern. Above all, it is an encounter because information warfare represents either an externality of the ‘good globalization ’ that has brought prosperity to the Republic, or at worst an inevitable ‘negative globalization ’ that causes damage. This binary conceptualization will be evident throughout this chapter, and indeed, aside from treating this as a feature of the preliminary Singaporean experience, it should be queried whether any national encounter with informational threats poses a quandary about the dual nature of globalization.

Since this chapter is situated in a book that calls ...