"'Cyber security' is a recent addition to the global security agenda, concerned with protecting states and citizens from the misuse of computer networks for war, terrorism, economic espionage and criminal gain. Many argue that the ubiquity of computer networks calls for robust and pervasive countermeasures, not least governments concerned at their potential effects on national and economic security. Drawing on critical literature in international relations, security studies, political theory and social theory, this is the first book that describes how these visions of future cyber security are sustained in the communities that articulate them. Specifically, it shows that conceptions of time and temporality are foundational to the politics of cyber security. It explores how cyber security communities understand the past, present and future, thereby shaping cyber security as a political practice. Integrating a wide range of conceptual and empirical resources, this innovative book provides insight for scholars, practitioners and policymakers"--"Security is an inherently temporal proposition. In the modern political philosophical tradition, security is an essential bulwark against the exigencies of an unknowable future. For Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan (1651) is a foundation of Western political theory, security is the antidote to a situation in which man, 'in the care of future time, hath his heart all day long, gnawed on by feare of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep' (Hobbes 1996: 76).

Security arises as a central feature of the social contract between people and the state, in which the pursuit and practices of security are invoked to calm the jittery present by the imposition of order on times yet to come"--.