Reconfiguring Citizen Participation in Cybersecurity

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What threats count in cybersecurity? As a field, cybersecurity can seem obscure and daunting to outsiders, a domain for hackers, cyber-warriors and technical experts, who are more often than not male. Yet, everyone is exposed to potentially vulnerable technology. This research project pioneers a model of citizen participation in cybersecurity both to empower citizens in relation to their own cybersecurity practices and advance the field of cybersecurity by incorporating their perspectives and personal experiences.Feminist theorists have challenged binaries of personal/political violence in conventional security studies, arguing these ignore or diminish the threat of gender-based violence and threats to women's security. Unfortunately, the field of cybersecurity has not incorporated these insights on the relationship between the personal and the political and therefore risks omitting many forms of technological abuse from the "threat models" that shape where researchers investigate challenges to security. Threat modelling procedures in cybersecurity often rely on experts to identify vulnerabilities and potential attackers. Despite being presented as abstract and impartial, this process often reflects assumptions about the causes of insecurity among elite technology users. For example, our pilot research conducted between the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and UCL Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) found that intimate threats are ignored in the security analyses and the design of smart home devises, which focus instead on threats like hackers or burglars (Slupska 2019). Emerging Internet of Things and smart home devices can leave people vulnerable to new classes threats from their domestic partners (Leitão 2019; Tanczer et al. 2018).By inviting citizens to participate in defining both what makes them feel threatened online, and how they could feel empowered to counter those threats, this project will humanise cybersecurity methods and create new opportunities for citizens to engage with shaping the research questions that they think should matter within cybersecurity. This project will do this by running eight co-design workshops on citizen cybersecurity. Each workshop will reconfigure assumptions about technical expertise by providing free digital security training to empower citizens to reflect on their own practices and to surface new types of threats to contribute to cybersecurity knowledge. Facilitators will also lead opt-in group discussions and focus groups on the relationships between personal experience and cybersecurity knowledge. Our objectives are to improve existing practices through reflective discussion, promote citizens' active involvement in their own cybersecurity, and solicit input for shaping and refining the directions of the academic field. The workshops will be free and open to all and will be hosted in conjunction with community organisations in the Oxford, London and Paris metro areas. Each participant will leave the workshop with practical advice on how to improve their cybersecurity practices. Participants will also have the opportunity to voluntarily contribute their observations, experiences, and stories with researchers in an open and safe environment to contribute to research. We will also elicit volunteers for coding and analysing data, and work to develop how we might use workshop participants to train others.This project will bring together partners in the Oxford Internet Institute; the Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity at the University of Oxford; the Gender and IoT project at the UCL Science, Technology and Public Policy Department; Power Play, a feminist activist theatre company, and Darktrace, a cyber-defence company. We will also work with community groups in Oxford, London and Paris in hosting and publicising each workshop and recruiting potential participants.