Information Warfare

As we entered the third wave, we traded in our pens and notebooks, for keyboards and CPU’s. A simple wire connected from a phoneline to a modem to your CPU, brings the whole world into your hands. And you into the worlds hand as well. Political realism is defined as doing what is necessary for survival. One must depend on themselves, because no one else will look out for them. Information Warfare has become a massly used tactic by individuals as well as companies looking out for their own survival, in a world of commerce, and politics. Information Warfare is an innovative and dangerous new way to harm your opponents. When one thinks of warfare the mind is usually bombarded by thoughts of M16’s, grenades, and hand to hand combat. In this new era of technology that we are living in warfare has come to mean so much more. Information warfare is the use of any type of information used to injure your opponent’s progress and further your own. The power of Information Warfare spans a broad scope of uses, from the gathering information about companies, to personal blackmail. It’s used not only by individuals against other persons, but companies and even the nation as well. As the third wave, defined by Tofflers, becomes more widely spread across the nation and world we can only expect a far larger usage of such technological tactics, being used in the home, workplace, and even international politics. Schwartau’s definition of Information Warfare is, “the use of information, and information systems as both weapons and targets in a conflict,” (Schwartau 12). We are now living in a time when knowledge is power, and what is knowledge made up of? Quite simply, information. Information Warfare is not only becoming more rampantly used among people, but they are using different types as well. There are three different classifications of Information Warfare. The first one deals with personal information warfare.