Open, Control And Cooperation: The U.s. National Security Policy Analysis

The information technology can be used to markedly reduce the costs of exchanging information. Ever since the 1970s, the application of information technology has been sweeping through the whole world and has had a profound influence upon human society. As a result, the information technology, as other new technologies did in history, launches to the state actors a serious challenge, the core issue of which is national information security.In the 1980s, Toffler and other futurists observed that non-state actors might present major threats to the security of state actors by fully exploiting information technology, based on the analytical framework that the development of information technology would inevitably result in a "power shift" from state actors to non-state actors. Since early 1990s particularly, there has been an upsurge in the studies on the relationship between information technology and national security, with information technology has further integrated into military, economic and social lives and modern society has acquired a larger stake in information infrastructure. Notably, a technological analysis on information security and studies based on "information warfare", "network warfare" and "network-centered warfare" have received remarkable concentration. In international relations theory, however, a macro-analysis is frequently applied to discuss how information technology makes an impact on the international political system, focusing on national security in the information age, while there has been no sufficient discourse on the making and the details of national information security policies. Focusing on the evolution of post-Cold War U.S. national information security policies, this thesis tries to clarity the process of the making, and major factors that influence the evolution, of national information security policies through text analysis and case studies. Three major assumptions are included in the thesis:1. The cognition of information security is one of the most important effects that affect the decision making process of US national information security policy and the change of cognition is the main driving force which effect the change of national information security policy.2. The quiddity of the decision making process of US national information security policy is to make a balance between two main methods: opening and controlling. The controlling has a limit prior to the opening after the 911 terrorism...