26 Years After Gibson, Pentagon Defines 'Cyberspace'

"More than two decades after novelist William Gibson coined the term cyberspace as a 'consensual hallucination' of data... the Pentagon has come up with its own definition," Inside Defense reports. "A May 12 'for official use only' memo signed by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England... offers a 28-word meaning for the term."

It is decidedly "less poetic" than Gibson's. It is different from previous military definitions. And it doesn't exactly square with how the Air Force's new "Cyberspace Command" sees this emerging battlefield.

Cyberspace, England writes, is “a global domain within the information environment consisting of the interdependent network of information technology infrastructures, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers.”

It is a far cry from the prose Gibson used in his 1984 novel “Neuromancer” to describe cyberspace: “A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”

The Pentagon's definition will “serve as the foundation” upon which the Defense Department will “further mature this warfighting domain,” England writes. And "it is not the first time the U.S. government has tried to define, or redefine, cyberspace," Inside Defense notes.

“Cyberspace is composed of hundreds of thousands of interconnected computers, servers, routers, switches, and fiber optic cables that allow our critical infrastructures to work,” states the Bush administration’s 2003 National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. “Thus, the healthy functioning of cyberspace is essential to our economy and our national security.”

In the 2006 National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations, a classified document, the Joint Chiefs of Staff defined cyberspace as “a domain characterized by the use of electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum to store, modify and exchange data via networked systems and associated physical infrastructures.”

Major General William T. Lord, the chief of the Air Force's new Cyberspace Command, expanded that definition evern further, saying, "We define the domain as the entire electromagnetic spectrum." Everything from microwaves to radio to lasers to x-rays, on other words. He sees his fledgling force conducting "not just [c]omputer network operations, but [a]lso [e]lectronic warfare, electronic combat and even, potentially, directed energy."

Exactly how that will square with the Pentagon new definition of cyberspace remains to be seen.

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