Page 54 - Cyber Terrorism and Extremism as Threat to Critical Infrastructure Protection

SECTION I: EXTREMISM, RADICALIZATION AND CYBER THREATS AS AN IMPORTANT
SECURITY FACTORS FOR COUNTERING TERRORISM PROCESSES

state (Schwirtz and Goldstein, 2017). How we conceptualize this relationship between the
Russian state and these non-state actors impacts how we view Russia in GPC and how we
respond to their cyberspace actions. While the relationship between Russian patriotic hackers
and the Russian state has been extensively researched (Applegate, 2011; Dinniss, 2013; Sum-

mers, 2017),the relationship between the Russian state and Russia cybercriminals is less well
understood. If we understand better what the relationship between Russian cybercriminals
and the Russian state is, as well as how Russia implicitly steers criminal groups to further
their foreign policy interests, it will alter the way in which the United States responds to Rus-
sian cyberspace actions. The aim of this paper is to illuminate the false distinction between
national security and crime, with a focus on Russia (Broadhurst et al., 2014).

In what follows, I will first lay out the state of the literature in Dark International Relations
(IR), a burgeoning field, and the main jumping-off point for this paper, the cyber mercenary
thesis. I then move on to how the Russian state has created an implicit avenue in which it does
not have to direct its cybercriminals to achieve the state’s ends. In the third part of the paper, I
show the connection between the state and cybercriminals as part of a fourth cyber mercenary
typology. I conclude with some observations about the false distinction between crime and
national security.

2 The State of the Literature

The relationship between the Russian state and Russian cyber criminals falls under “Dark IR.”
This term, coined by Paul Kan, addresses the gap in the literature wherein criminal states are
left out of the dominant IR theories, since they fall between Realism’s primary focus on the
state and conflict in the international system, and Liberalism’s integration of non-state actors
and the potential for cooperation. As stressed by Kan, the focus on criminal states also has a
place within another major IR program, Constructivism, in that Dark IR explains why some
states interact with the illicit world of crime to further their international agendas, and why
other states choose to focus on “nice norms such as human rights, environmental protection,
climate change, and women’s rights” (Kan, 2019). That is to say, there is a normative compo-
nent to the way in which states are supposed to act in both Realism and Liberalism, and those
states that look the other way to criminal enterprise are violating the positive IR norm while
concurrently perpetuating a negative IR norm. Of course, there are different degrees to which
states embrace criminal enterprise in order to further their agendas.

Michael Miklaucic and Moises Naim follow this theme of negative norms in Dark IR, and
note that at one end of the spectrum is “criminal penetration” of the state, where a criminal
enterprise is able to place one of their own into the state structure; this individual in that ca-
pacity works both for the state and for the criminal enterprise. Further up the chain of criminal
penetration is “criminal infiltration”, where the criminal enterprise begins to spread through-
out the institutions of the state, thereby allowing illicit networks to proliferate. According to
Miklaucic and Naim, even worse than criminal infiltration is “criminal capture”, where the
takeover of the state is so complete that criminal agents are in positions of power that excludes
them from prosecution. Finally, worst of all, is the “criminal sovereign”, at which point the
state uses criminal activity as a matter of policy. It is this last stage that the Russian state finds
itself in today. As noted by Mark Galeotti, the Russian government has now become the larg-
est gang in the state (Galeotti, 2017).

54