Rules of war for cyberspace
John Stokes 1:16am
The Obama administration is planning to rewrite the rulebook for warfare establishing new laws for war in cyberspace including a series of international agreements that will spell out just what actions are permissible and what will be considered an act of war. For the first time, countries like China, which launch millions of attacks every day will face the prospect of retaliatory action, including the use of a new arsenal of cyber weapons.
As this blog predicted, President Obama announced last week a series of major new initiatives designed to secure cyberspace from attack. Much of the reporting has focused on the creation of a new office in the White House to coordinate cyber activity and the creation of a new Cyber Command in the Pentagon to manage offense and defense.
While such bureaucratic window dressing is perhaps necessary, the facts are that the US already has extensive offensive capabilities. If the Pentagon wished, it could turn off the lights in Beijing or raise the sluice gates of the dam on Three Gorges Dam and kill millions of people. So the weapons are already developed and ready for use. What is lacking is any kind of developed military doctrine that would allow these weapons to be used in a context that military and political leaderships around the world could understand.
Conventional warfighting has evolved over centuries and the doctrine for the use of force between nations is very well understood. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) provides a deterrence structure that prevents the use of nuclear weapons and international agreements make sure that accidental war does not break out. There are no effective international agreements in cyberspace, no cyber war fighting doctrine and no real understanding between governments about what is offense and what is defense. This has allowed countries like Russia and China to attacks other nations with impunity and steal billions of dollars in intellectual property while raping and pillaging inside the infrastructure of foreign governments.
Buried in the 76-page cyber strategy report that accompanied last week’s Presidential announcement is a clue to what lies ahead: “The Nation also needs a strategy for cybersecurity designed to shape the international environment and bring like-minded nations together on a host of issues, such as technical standards and acceptable legal norms regarding territorial jurisdiction, sovereign responsibility, and use of force.”
What this means is that the Obama administration will begin sounding out allies to start the creation of a cyber warfighting doctrine. At the same time, the administration will engage with other countries such as China and Russia to explain that in the near future there could be a heavy price to be paid for attacks launched on American or allied targets through cyberspace.
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London Calling
May 31st, 2009 8:28am Report this commentBon Hommes...:)
Verity
May 31st, 2009 2:01pm Report this commentWell, I can't stand the man, but to be fair, so far so good.
Ian C
May 31st, 2009 7:55pm Report this commentDoes this mean that some film director with, erm, vision can come up with a film series over a prolonged but hugely profitable period, for some, entitled "Cyber Wars"?
Film 1 will be "The One: New Hope" in which the world is struck by some evil force but the new hero emerges as disaster is just averted.
Film 2 will be "New Hope Strikes Back". In this The One will emerge as being in total control of the force and become feared by all meddlers across cyberspace.
Film 3 will be "Return of the Cyber Warriors" when peace and calm rule is restored to cyberspace. But at the end there are disquieting developments that sets up the next episode.
Film 4 "Revenge of the Nerds" will find chaos returned and The One, drastically, finds his powers suddenly diminished and is exposed as not quite what was thought.
Film 5 will be "Return of The One" when it is finaly realised that whatever the Nerds and all else do, The One is all that matters - and if they had realised it sooner they would not have needed a multi-film series and the repetitive replays of the highlights of how he became the all knowing and powerful..............One king in, and of, Cyberspace.
David Bouvier
June 1st, 2009 9:53am Report this commentAm I a a raving cynic for imagining that one of the early consequences will be increasing surveillance of the domestic internet, along with requirements for personal identification of accounts/computers "for security reasons"?
Verity
June 1st, 2009 3:16pm Report this commentDavid Bouvier - Oh, Gawd, I hadn't thought of that! This will definitely happen in Britain and Europe. The Americans have much more robust protection for citizens' rights. (Although that doesn't mean that Obama won't have a crack at diminishing them.)
rmh
June 2nd, 2009 9:59am Report this commentSince when, and exactley where has Obama sought to reduce citizens rights.
Keeping pro-choice and having better union recognition are two measure which are pro the person, rather than pro business or wingnut ideology.
His rhetoric against Iran is also decent and trying to clip the wings of Israel is no bad thing, and a more pliant Israel could yield some results in the region.
Israel is already the big kid in the schoolyard and will always be the kid with the biggest Dad, so having them work with rather than against the progressive mindset is worth doing.
David Bouvier
June 2nd, 2009 4:47pm Report this commentRMH - What kind of ideological wingnuttery is it to describe everything you like as "pro person". I think you are my first honest to goodness Obamatron Troll.
Abortion I imagine has both sides claiming to be pro person. Unionisation is not pro business-owner, not pro non union worker. I suppose it is pro union activist.
I struggle to work out what being "pro person" means or how it relates to civil liberties, if shifting your middle eastern rhetorical stance is part of it too. Truly bizarre.
Me, I am uniformly pro-dog. People I take case by case.
N
June 2nd, 2009 5:32pm Report this commentGee, what a great way to tie one hand behind our backs...again. In Iraq and Afghanistan terrorist insurgents are "allowed" to break the rules of the Geneva conventions and all other "rules of war", do people honestly think that people are going to abide by these cyber rules? One of the "great things" about cyber attacks is that they are extremely hard to track so people can easily break the rules and get away with it. Look at the internet: scammers, hackers, and crackers, get away with stuff everyday and no one catches them, are these "rules" really going make a difference? You can't police the internet! There are no rules in warfare, as soon as we have to abide by a set of rules that politicians, not soldiers, come up with we are defeated. Vietnam in the 70's, the enemy would hide across the borders in Laos and Cambodia, places US soldiers were forbidden to go, thus the enemy wasn't defeated. Terrorists and guerrillas hide among the civilian population (a clear breach of the Geneva Conventions) yet engaging the civilian population is frowned upon (i'm not advocating firing on civilans, but if the civilians help the terrorists and we can't engage them, we are defeated).
This is a stupid waste of time Mr. Obama, instead of trying to apply rules that you hope the enemy will follow, you should be stepping up defenses.
rmh
June 3rd, 2009 5:11pm Report this comment@ David Bouvier
Since when does an embryo have legal status as a person. Abortion is a choice for the person who is pregnant, which I guess is where the wingnuts go all foam at the mouth.
That said, I see no rebuttle of the fact that he is seeking to reduce citizen rights.
David Bouvier
June 4th, 2009 12:41pm Report this commentRMH -
The disagreement over what constitutes a person is the whole point of the anti-abortion argument isn't it. "Pro-person" begs the question.
There is no persuasive value in being pro-person if we don't agree on the definition of person.
And my main point was that most of your examples simply involved asserting that something you liked was "pro-person".
So it is not clear that we have any shared understanding of "pro" either ;-)
Obama - like new Labour - has no obvious attachment to individual liberty so may well trample over it for administrative convenience should it prove inconvenient. I hope to be wrong on this.
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