First blog posts are supposed to tell a founding story, give exhaustive reasons for being, entertain with some colorful anecdotes, ramble a bit, and conclude with exhortations of grand designs.  This week’s events seem to be conspiring against an introduction quite so splashy.

Yesterday (7 July) concluded with a score of high-profile site outages and higher-profile accusations that have forced my hand. What was initially envisioned as a month-long period of pre-press design and content development, (a timeframe befitting of the 3+ years I have been pursuing this domain) has been shortened to just over 24 hours. The new DNS information may not have even reached the outer limits of the internet.

But with all the mainstream media ink being spilled over the events of the last few days, it’s clearly time to start unraveling all this ‘cyber’ news, and delve into the myriad issues at the intersection of national security and networked technology.

And so, in its hurried debut, is CyberWonk v0.5.

Cyber experts might see yesterday as nothing new; after all in the cyber-security world, like that of Kundera’s novel, all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.  Cyberattacks are not new, and yesterday’s was no ‘digital Pearl Harbor.’  Yet while opportunities to put pen to paper with good purpose may be common in this field, chances to do so with the world’s attention thereupon are disappointingly few.  It would be naïve not to blame ourselves, the policy and national security communities, for that lack of awareness.  It’s time we examined the issues from the standpoint of broader national security policy, made them less terrifying to the non-technical audience, and most importantly brought together the presently disparate elements of debate.  In a word, this blog seeks to demonstrate the truth: that cyber is no backwater, that it must permeate our thinking about national security strategy and, perhaps, that Cyber can be sexy.

So the hurried history of this blog mirrors my own hopes for cyber-policy debate at large: it’s time to stop fussing over the atmospherics, and get writing.

Welcome to the conversation.