Their threat is constructed---the post 9/11 security state depicts the internet as a warzone which causes mass surveillance and militarization.

The media have also portrayed hackers as smart, creative individuals whose energies and talents benefit the nation. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is a former hacker and Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California is located on Hacker Way. Public hack-a-thons are organized by non-profits and government institutions to propose solutions to various problems. Such activities draw on the long-standing appreciation of hackers as creatives who “think outside the box” and are sources of innovation. Governments enlist hackers in espionage efforts and other secret operations (Follis and Fish 2020). Clearly, all hackers and all hacks are not alike. Consequently, the aim of a hacker or the damage resulting from a hack needs to be assessed in order to decide whether the hack constitutes a prank, vandalism, theft, terrorism, an act of war, or something else. These distinctions are obscured, however, by the US government and popularized in the media’s dissemination of the vision of the internet as a new terrain of war. To better understand the meaning of this development, however, we need to view it in the context of two profound societal shifts—the culture and politics of the “war on terror” and the permeation of digital media into everyday life. Security Culture and Digital Life Powerful discourses about cyberthreats, cyberweapons, and a digital arms race now circulate across multiple domains including official government statements, journalism, corporate communications, and entertainment. Two developments—the post 9/11 American security state and the new affordances of digital media—intertwine in dynamic ways to make cybersecurity a matter of social and political consequence, rather than simply a technocratic concern. Since 9/11, ongoing processes of securitization have highlighted the functions of the US government as a provider of security while making security measures highly visible to Americans in their everyday lives. Over the same period, digital technologies have transformed the way people communicate, conduct their social and work lives, get news and information, express themselves, store and circulate documents, images, opinions and more. There is a powerful synergy between these two processes. Catherine Lutz reminds us that long “before 9/11, nearly every aspect of the American way of life began to depend on, entwine with, or suffer from a massive investment in arms and armies” (2010:45). But as Joseph Masco’s recent exploration of the culture of the American national security state argues, “counterterror” following 9/11 has created an “unlimited space and time horizon for military state action” and “a world without borders, generating threats without limits” (2014:2). This national security culture is the larger context out of which new militaristic frameworks for understanding the internet are produced. The security culture promoted by the US government to combat terrorism after 9/11 involved new logics of threat and the organization of security around the idea of terror, rather than a fixed enemy (Masco 2014). This has expanded the authority of the state into gray areas. This political shift can be partly understood through contrasting something that is invasive which crosses boundaries and something that is pervasive which obscures them. The War on Terror blurs the borders between war and peace. It is temporal in the diminished distinction between war time and peace time, and it is spatial in the ways that war zones and civilian spaces cease to be clearly differentiated. In the War on Terror, war (enemies, threats, targets, and so on) is not limited temporally or spatially, and security is premised on the idea that attacks could happen anywhere at any time. In a similar way, digital media have penetrated everyday life so widely that the boundaries between online and offline have become less significant, and perhaps indeterminate (boyd 2012, Nordenson 2020). While the internet was once associated with the virtual and culturally constructed as another plane of existence and expression, the digital is now integrated into the daily lives and activities of Americans. Digital media facilitated the creation of vast borderless networks not under the control of any government. When viewed from the perspective of the state in the context of a war on terror, such vast networks of communications and social relations are bound up with threats and security. Where the digital, despite its origins in military development, came to be associated with new forms of freedom and community, it now is increasingly depicted as a realm of warfare, a weapons system, and a vector of threat. Underpinning ideas about the destructive force of the internet is connectivity itself; because today so many facets of daily life involve digital networks. Thus, during his time as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army, General Martin Dempsey said that gaps in corporate cybersecurity pose a threat to national security because the US military depends on commercial networks (Hennigan 2015). From this perspective, the interconnectedness made possible by the internet is being used to construct a world where nothing lies outside military concerns. The internet offers a perfect field for the expansion of threat scenarios set in “a world without borders, generating threats without limits” as Masco (2014) has described American national security culture around nuclear weapons and the war on terror, because cyberspace is already imagined as borderless, global, and future-oriented. The openness and borderlessness of digital communications is threatening to states. Many governments in the global south engage in temporary internet shutdowns during times of heightened political activity (Freyburg and Garbe 2018, Wagner 2018). Some governments restrict online activities and expression through blocking and censorship (Warf 2011, Akgül and Kırlıdoğ 2015). The US government has taken a subtler approach, relying on surveillance and casting the internet as a site for terrorism and war. This discursive construction of the internet as a war zone is distinct from the US government’s long involvement and investment in developing digital technologies specifically for military purposes (Silver and Marwick 2006). Routine digital communications, online activities, and data of Americans’ daily lives have come to be regarded as potential sources of threats to national security, and therefore in need of government surveillance as famously revealed by Edward Snowden (Greenwald 2014, Lyon 2015b). In terms of discourse, it is noteworthy that the NSA’s secret programs of digital mass surveillance have been consistently described by officials in deceptively benign scientific-sounding terms—such as “data collection,” “data gathering,” and “monitoring”—and journalists often emploed the same language even when not quoting directly.