Cyber War Manual Proposes Online Geneva Convention 90
judgecorp writes "A new manual for cyber war has been compiled by international legal experts and published by NATO. The manual proposes that hospitals and dams should be off-limits for online warfare, and says that a conventional response is justified if an attack causes death or serious damage to property. The manual might get its first practical application today — South Korea's TV stations and banks have come under an attack which may well originate from North Korea."
Re:Frightening (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't worry, China is on track [economist.com] to outpace the US in military expenditures by 2023 [bloomberg.com]. I'm sure that's all for "peaceful regional defense" and will have no impact on the US.
China's military rise
http://www.economist.com/node/21552212 [economist.com]
The dragon's new teeth: A rare look inside the world's biggest military expansion
http://www.economist.com/node/21552193 [economist.com]
Essential reading on China cyber:
The Online Threat: Should we be worried about a cyber war? (The first page of this is a must read wrt China.)
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/01/101101fa_fact_hersh [newyorker.com]
Great snippet: ""The N.S.A. would ask, 'Can the Chinese be that good?' " the former official told me. "My response was that they only invented gunpowder in the tenth century and built the bomb in 1965. I'd say, 'Can you read Chinese?' We don't even know the Chinese pictograph for 'Happy hour.'"
To say nothing of the more recent news.
But yes, yes...this is all about "false flag" attacks, because naturally the US is always the evil aggressor, and there has never been any oppression or tyranny in the world, save for what the US has foisted upon it. The principles of freedom for which the US stands are just an illusion force fed to a compliant public by the lapdog mainstream press. In fact, we probably have secret time machines so we could extend this evil beyond our nation's short existence in this world. That explains all the bad things that happened before we were around.
Re:Frightening (Score:2, Interesting)
China's military might be able to buy things for a fraction of what it costs the Pentagon to buy something comparable, but they also have to deal with the flip side of the equation -- it's hard enough to verify that high-quality components were used to build hardware when you have the kind of supply-chain culture the US defense industry does, and it's technically possible to read the laser-etched code off of a bolt and trace it all the way back to the miners who were working the day the ore was excavated from the mine & the date itself... then follow it through to the lab reports, quality analysis, chain of custody, and everything else all the way to the finished product. This anal retentive obsession is a big part of the reason *why* the Pentagon will end up paying $17 for that bolt & the mile-long paperwork audit trail behind it. However, it also means that the Pentagon's purchasing department can sleep soundly at night knowing that 99.999% of everything that passes through their custody is precisely what it's supposed to be.
That's an advantage the PLA doesn't have today, and it's going to take decades for them to attain because it goes beyond law, punishment, and technology -- you need an entire set of cultural norms to back it up and keep it enforced even when somebody ISN'T necessarily watching like a hawk. China's electronics industry in particular has a grand tradition of finding incredibly creative ways to cut corners and reduce costs in ways that aren't necessarily obvious or readily apparent... at least, not until long after the goods have been sold & delivered.
If an American soldier runs the self-diagnostics on a robot or tank's computer system & it tells him the system is functioning at 100% capacity with no problems, he can pretty much believe it as an article of blind faith. Pity the poor Chinese soldier who takes HIS gear's word for it, and doesn't realize that they were programmed to lie up until a fraction of a second before something fails catastrophically. Oh, if it happens enough, China's government will find someone to blame & execute them in a very public way to make an example out of them, but that's not much consolation to the fighter pilot who's flying near ground level in zero visibility by instruments to avoid detection, and ends up flying into the side of a mountain that's supposed to be 90 feet below him.
That said, if China ever decided to nuke America with ICBMs, we're *all* totally fucked, even more than we would have been in a Soviet nuclear strike, because the same failures that will probably send at least 5-10% of the missiles crashing into the Pacific, northern Canada, and Gulf of Mexico will ALSO probably have at least 10-20% of them raining down on small towns in Alabama, upstate New York, cow pastures in Minnesota, and trailer parks on the edge of the Arizona desert. At least the Soviet missiles would have been reasonably likely to detonate within 5-10 miles of their intended targets, and were mostly aimed at military targets and a few big cities. China would be more likely to take the "middle" route -- shitloads and shitloads of smaller missiles, indiscriminately thrown just about everywhere in the approximate general direction, purchased for 10% of what American missiles cost to build, on the statistical assumption that at least a few will end up detonating somewhat near their intended targets. Residents of Manhattan might head outside the next morning to a city that's largely intact, and eventually see photos of the smoldering cratered wastelands that used to be the Jersey Shore and Appalachia.
If we're lucky, we might get one tiny consolation prize... reports that Tianjing and Chonggqing were nuked 27 minutes before the American missiles even arrived, courtesy of two Chinese missile launches that went horribly, horribly wrong, hurled their payloads ~50 miles over the horizon, then crashed into the ground at sufficiently high speed to trigger criticality.
That said, I don't believe China would do anything as stupid as launch