Cyberwarfare in International Law 136
belmolis writes "If the CIA is right to attribute recent blackouts to cyberwarfare,
cyberwarfare is no longer science fiction but reality. In a recent op-ed piece and a detailed scholarly paper, legal scholar Duncan Hollis raises the question of whether existing international law is adequate for regulating cyberwarfare. He concludes that it is not: 'Translating existing rules into the IO context produces extensive uncertainty, risking unintentional escalations of conflict where forces have differing interpretations of what is permissible. Alternatively, such uncertainty may discourage the use of IO even if it might produce less harm than traditional means of warfare. Beyond uncertainty, the existing legal framework is insufficient and overly complex. Existing rules have little to say about the non-state actors that will be at the center of future conflicts. And where the laws of war do not apply, even by analogy, an overwhelmingly complex set of other international and foreign law rules purport to govern IO.'"
What is IO? (Score:2)
Re:What is IO? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What is IO, CoOp, and WTFC? (Score:2)
CIA guessed that cyberwar caused city blackouts. I gues
Reply:I took my lithium, What is LSD? (Score:2)
failing infrastructure and/or organized corporatist criminals caused
power-grid failures and city/regional blackouts over the past few decades.
It is a CIA budget ploy, or another whoops mistake by government managers.
It is always easy to scare the shit out of god fearing annal retentive
folks, because belief in mythology is pervasive in primitive cultures.
Fear-Capitalism mythology is the new Politically-Correct exploitation for US.
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Re:What is IO? (Score:2)
Why do people admit to not reading the articles and post anyway? IO is clearly defined in the first sentence of the second outbound link.
Coming late to the party, I can say that loading the page of Slashdot comments was faster than the loading of the first outbound link (second link in the article), and I was able to find the answer here faster, which is generally the case considering the load Slashdot at times cripplingly places on other sites.
I was willing to post a joke about the strategic significance a moon of Jupiter in order to ask the question, or make an observation that someone was being clever in making IO resemble one and zero.
Any Babelfish in the house? (Score:2)
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What will be interesting to watch (for those keen on subtle, baseball-like action that is exciting as watching paint dry for the casual viewer) is the interplay between the need for legal recourse, which implies some international body having jurisdiction, and the serious US allergy to anything that sets precedent to diminish national sovereignty.
That issue is among the major reasons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_ [wikipedia.org]
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Our window of privacy is closing rather rapidly. Today, the US Eavesdropping Regime made a huge step forward, using complicit and spineless democrats like Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller as their point men. The telecommunications industry's bribes were just to much for them to resist, apparently.
The lesson I've learned in the past 7 years is this: when you start to hear trial balloons floated a
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I guess I'd echo that sentiment by saying that the amount and flavors of fear used by both conferences of the American Political Football League is quite staggering.
You've got fear of: o
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* I was going to find a statistic on the number of Fatal shootings annually by pol
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Tactically, terrorism is a bigger threat. The evidence is fairly clear that they don't mind dying, and that freedom from normal concerns about self-preservation renders terrorists highly unpredictable. Fortunately, there are not too many of them, as a fraction of world population.
Strategically, the concern about the government is well-founded. Bureaucrats seem to believe in government with the same fervo
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Tactically the state (through policy) and terrorism pose a similar if different (in aims and method) threat. The chances of any given individual being abused and or killed by the state, (or an individual acting for personal gain but with the protection of state granted power) is much greater than any threat actually posed by terrorists. These actions are usually justified as being in the interests of the state (invasive security measures, the inappropriate use of
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Not buying off on your analysis of Terrist goals, though. The counter-argument is that they would like to, in essence, repeat the North Vietnamese pattern post-Tet Offensive.
Thank you most sincerely for a though-provoking post.
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Second, if I thought the type of authoritarian approaches (widespread surveillance, no habeas corpus, renditions, torture, etc) really helped fight terrorism, it would be a different matter, but I don't think so.
Third, it's not so much that I think there is something inherently threatening about government, I don't.
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The rub of my argument about the strategic threat of government is that "this particular" means little.
It's all one vast, continuous business run by a very small group of incredibly loaded oligarchs. The
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I think that they just want to blather on as if they understand what is going on here. Trying to ascribe other motives assumes too much of them.
Cyberwarfare has been going on for almost ten years. It does not amount to very much because we are not as dependent on technology as folk imagine. Case in point we lost all power on the North East coast of the US a few years back, civilization did not collapse. Even if the
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So I read it to mean that pencil dick military commanders want to be able to hack and destroy other peoples computers in other countries if they disclose damaging information about the military, or the put of evidence of mili
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Fixed (Score:2, Insightful)
The world is growing into the tech age at different rates. The issue is that international laws differ greatly on what constitutes a cyber-crime (see: China) -- what one country considers harmless in another country may result in a lifetime sentence in prison. This discourages not only crime, but international espionage, because the consequences could be disastrous. Laws also diff
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I personally think that the understanding is more important than the tech level insert series of tubes comment here.
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If the CIA is right to the recent blackouts cyberwarfare attributes of the computer war However, the reality is no longer science fiction. Op-ed piece in a recent scholarly papers and detailed, legal scholars DANKANHORISU raise the question of whether the existing international law to the appropriate regulatory cyberwarfare. His conclusion is not: 'translating the existing rules IO generated widespread uncertainty in the context of the conflict is a dangerous military escalations where interpretation is not intended to be the difference between what is permissible. Also, this kind of uncertainty might be deterred from the use of low-IO, even if you might have a harmful effect on productivity than traditional means of warfare. Uncertainties beyond the existing legal framework is inadequate and overly complex. Existing rules, which have little to say, especially non-state actors in future conflicts. And the laws of war do not apply where the analogy with the overwhelmingly complex configuration and other foreigners to the rules of international law governing the purpose IO.
Hope this helps!
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I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street... many days no business come to my hut... my hut... but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo... dung. ...Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans... and pants to match. The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey.
Enemy combatants? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Enemy combatants? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the inevitable and ingenious evolution of war, IMO. Not, as ST:TOS "A Taste of Armageddon" would have it, but without any bloodshed or casualties in the physical sense. By hitting people in their infrastructure, their way of life, and their economy. (Sortof what the 9-11 guys thought they were doing...and heck, what all us 'rich' countries do all the time through sanctions, trade agreements, 'wars' on drugs, and such...)
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The real sticky part though is how the law will cross borders. Cyber warfare knows no borders, so what would our government do if someone from Iran came calling to arrest one of our own on such charges?
It wouldn't be pretty, that's for sure--probably some sort of extradition amongst allied countries, o'course, but with hostile countries, it could lead to a meatspace conflict of some kind should it escalate far enough.
But what exactly would be considered an 'act of war' in such a situation, anyway? Would it have to cause some form of physical or financial damage to a person or institution in the country being attacked? Or would merely an "illegal border crossing" (e.g. gaining access to a server)
no evidence (Score:4, Insightful)
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cluelessness (Score:3, Insightful)
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Now if you'd said that someone would have to be clueless to imagine that combatants always *abide* by the laws regarding war, that's a whole different issue.
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War, by it very nature, is a chaotic business. One cannot regulate chaos using lawyers.
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They aren't always followed, and they certainly aren't being followed by some countries I could mention, but war is supposed to have rules.
The problem with electronic warfare (Cyberwar? e-war? wartronics?) is that you're attacking civilians. There are horrible weaknesses in a great many systems (including the trunked radios used by first responders) that can easily be exploited. Remember, a lot of our coding is done overseas and/or done by exchange students on
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The thing about international law is that it's based on treaties. This leads to some very counter-intuitive aspects of international law.
Imagine if it was only illegal to murder someone if you and the person you killed had both agreed not to murder each other. Pretty weird, huh? Well, strictl
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All of these quaint efforts overlook the fact that war is, by definition, the breakdown of a
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Re:cluelessness (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's useless to have laws of war. There is no reason to believe they make conflicts worse and every reason to believe that they help reduce civilian casualties, torture, etc. During WW1 gas weapons saw wide deployment, and they were banned not because they were ineffective, but because of the danger they reprsented to all soldiers and civilians. Gas weapons have been used since (notably in the Iran-Iraq war), but widespread use is a thing of the past. Ditto for flamethrowers and flame weapons in general (Phosphor weapons are making a comeback though. Bush apparently thinks burning people alive is fun).
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However, for the record, as a modest student of history, I disagree with you. I'm aware that people have set "rules of war" for millenia, but I stand by my position that there are no historical examples whatsoever in which these have had actual and serious measurable force. The fact that the behaviour of combatants has accidentally or for other, more compellingly practical reasons, sometimes conformed to the "rules" proves nothing. If, sta
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Just consider the unusual viciousness of civil wars, e.g. the American Civil War, the Terror in post-Revolutionary France, the Thirty Years War within Germany, or the Russian Civil War. ... The wound from a brother is always more painful, more like to anger.
I think you're singling out the particularly bad civil wars. The Civil War WAS a cultural conflict, the Terror and the Russian Civil War followed centuries of oppression. The breakup of the Soviet Union, for example, did not see so much acrimony. And where their was conflict, it was clearly ethnic.
If we're talking about NUMBER OF PEOPLE KILLED, the conflicts you cite don't hold a candle to even ancient examples of ethnic cleansing, like the Roman destruction of Egypt and Judea.
But in truth I suspect the causes of unusual hideousness in warfare are far too complex to be reduced to any simple formula.
On the small scale, I think
The End of World War II In Europe... (Score:2)
That being said, the western allies might not have been so friendly if the Germans had gotten as close to DC as they did to Moscow.
And that being said, the Germans got pretty damn close to London.
Rules of War do matter. Not always,
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All of these quaint efforts overlook the fact that war is, by definition, the breakdown of any shred of mutual trust and willingness to compromise. War is about killing people, and when you get to that stage of mutual rage and madness, no piece of paper full of high-minded sentiment is going to stop you from doing what you think you must to win (or not lose).
It really annoys me when people who are completely ignorant of history and even the most basic concepts of war and politics go spouting off about how they know it all. You sir are completely ignorant as to what is the purpose and objectives of war. At least read the basics like Sun Tzu and Clausewitz before you go claiming to have a complete understanding of the subject. To start you off, war is about attaining a political objective not killing people. The fewer the number of people killed is one measure
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War is supposed to target just those in uniform, fighting at the time.
No, war is supposed to achieve a political objective by destroying the opponent's ability to resist your political will. This can be achieved by:
Case 1 is very traditional, but since nations conscript soldier
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Re:cluelessness (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing that has ever restrained the behaviour of nations in combat is plain fear of the direct consequences, e.g. retaliation by the enemy. Can you give me a counter-example? Some case where a nation committed to a war, with substantial interests at stake, eschewed methods of war because some lawyer somewhere said they were "illegal?" If not, then those "regulations" are as insubstantial as moonbeams.
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My biggest concern with the currect US treatment of supposed terrorists, is that we are implicitly agreeing to the same treatment of our GIs in enemy hands. There is no doctrinal difference between the Hanoi Hilton and Guantanamo Bay.
There are dozens of examples
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I think I don't agree with that. It doesn't explain why the Japanese in the Pacific theater were monsters both to the Chinese (to whom they were militarily superior) and to the Americans (to whom they were military inferior). It makes it hard to explain why the Red Army did terrible things in Berlin in 1945 but the US Army did not.
There are plenty of cases when a clearly supe
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Which kind doesn't go away when you close your eyes?
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The Geneva Conventions on treatment of PoWs have largely been followed for decades as well.
There are obvious exceptions to both, but they have largely held. It is also true that fear of consequences played its part: but this was as much indirect consequences (it would influence the actions of currently neutral countries) as the direct reaction (if we use them, they will).
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And then, what do we mean by "not used" even then? Were nuclear weapons "not used?" They were certainly built and stockpiled, and used to threaten, deter, and otherwise advance national interests. The same is true of both bio and chem weapons, which were also built and
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I guess among the naive fools you find Goering [wikipedia.org], Milosevic [wikipedia.org], Taylor [bbc.co.uk], and W. Bush. Of course, the frat boy Bush hasn't really paid the price yet, while the US has lost status morally and politica
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But most people draw a much stronger distinction between what your neighbors think of you and whether or not you are a lawbreaker. Laws
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International law exists. It is the reference frame for nations interacting. What kind of idiot are you who mixes international law with public opinion?
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Cyber- (Score:3, Funny)
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Allow suing the power companies (Score:1)
This is definitely one situation where passing new laws to try and catch/punish the culprits is going to do diddly-squat, so they'll have to expend resources necessary to make a defense so solid that the matter becomes irrelevant.
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A big IF (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, look, "Die Hard 4" is fiction, and not very good fiction at that.
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But why didn't he shout "YEE-HAW!!!"?
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Overly Complex (Score:1)
The US=The World (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The US=The World (Score:5, Informative)
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(I don't personally care for some of Obama's policies, but fer heaven's sake, there's plenty to criticize without making stuff up...)
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The fact of it turning out to be an Estonian student is in many ways, irrelevant. It co
Adequate laws? (Score:3, Funny)
Because existing international law has done such a bang up job regulating real warfare.
You don't understand, there is no law against war (Score:2, Insightful)
Clear on that?
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For example, the Hague Convention of 1899 prohibited dum-dum bullets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dum-dum#Law [wikipedia.org] [1]
There's a long history of international law regulating particularly nasty applications. There is/was a similar restriction on using anti-aircraft weapons on ground troups, which is usually overlooked by gear-head historians writing about vehicles like the Skink and M42.
And of course there are the Geneva defintions about treatment of military personel, and what constitutes militar
The laws are never adequate (Score:2)
Small wonder a legal scholar thinks we all need more laws - his job is to read them.
Lawyers are like other people--fools on the average; but it is easier for an ass to succeed in that trade than any other.
-quoted in Sam Clemens of Hannibal, Dixon Wecter
There are no wars anymore (Score:2)
True stateless war (Score:5, Interesting)
The extreme malleability of data, software, and networks means that anyone can make anyone look like they are a participant in an attack. It won't surprise me if a large percentage of counterattacks, reprisals, or sanctions target the wrong party because they were just the last identifiable node in a long chain of proxies and dark-net hops. If one can make one enemy look like it attacked another enemy, then one can kill two enemy for the price of on DDoSing.
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From what I gather from recent Government History, I guess they simply want to know what kind of excuse they need to start a full-on war.
Once they know what can be used as what, all they need to do is trigger the right event from the right country and they can start an all new war.
(After all, it is cyberWARfare, they government has the right to kill people over it).
Maybe a portscan of dod.gov will have the gov't simply ask your ISP for your name and address, for future reference.
If they see a valid inciming
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Nuke LINX?
Thought i'd actually read the TFA (Score:1)
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In this context state means "country".
New Product: Firewalls for Home Electrical Grid? (Score:2)
But, it couldn't hurt to have a slew of Honda generators, arm-driven dynamo radio-cell phone charger units on hand.
A new war... (Score:2)
There's only one thing that can be done against any attacks in this vein, (and I don't trust a governmental analysis at all as a rule), and that is to tighten security on the defensive end. Trying to find and prosecute anybody is going to be a complete waste of time.
Oy...gives the politicians something to scare people with though, most of whom still think the word "hacker" means criminal...
Op-Ed and Rules of Engagement - retaliation... (Score:1)
When the laws of war don't apply -- even by analogy -- an overwhelmingly complex set of other international and foreign laws kicks in. For example, assume the hackers in the Estonia case were indeed operating from Russia but had no ties to the government or military. Under existing rules, Estonia should respond by asking Russia to police its own territory. To counter-attack would violate Russia's sovereignty. With new rules, however, nations could agree to waive sovereignty concerns a
CIA: not exactly a trustworthy source (Score:4, Insightful)
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If this threat were real, they'd just keep it - and the methods used to combat it - a secret for as long as possible, which is what they usually do. What possible reason would they have to reveal it to the press unless the primary objective is propaganda?
Obviously, the need for a secure U.S.A. infrastructure outweighs the CIA's desire for secrecy. If you keep it a secret, you can't really fix it now can you?
Unless you think that somehow the Gov't will be able to get the private sector to fix the problem without any information leaks. That'd be impressive as hell.
rules of engagement mean nothing in cyberspace (Score:2)
Cyber warfare does not exist in places you can get TV cameras. It is the perfect deniable operation. Therefore it is not possible to present "evidence" of transgressions to the court of public opinion, or international outrage
This crap might end... (Score:4, Interesting)
And that's not gonna happen any time soon.
It takes a lot to unravel an attack. More work than tracking down the source of a dirty bomb, or Avian Flu dose, or hallucinogens in the water supply.
More good reasons to not go hell-bent on integrating our utilities over the Internet. It cannot be secured. Only a matter of time before someone breaks into a SCADA access point and causes trouble here.
In the meantime, maybe Estonia's example is what we face. Temporary paralysis, expensive resolutions, and the awareness that this can and will happen again.
And in all this, ICANN wants to be independent of the U.S. Harrr... It would appear that the U.S. is not the source of the real trouble on the Internet. It's all the litle wannabees desperate to hurt someone/something else.
May they get a visit from a B-2 when they get caught.
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Could you imagine if DC's water supply got tainted with lsd?
Hundreds of thousands of people would see pretty patterns, a relatively large percentage of those would have a religious experience, and most of them would come out of it feeling refreshed, seeing the world in a new light with optimism and peace.
Sounds like it might end up being pretty rad, not terrorist at all...... that is, if they released it in such a low concentration that you'd only get 4-50 micro
Heinlein's Razor (Score:2)
>If the CIA is right to attribute recent blackouts to cyberwarfare
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Fucking with us (Score:1)
old fashioned warfare (Score:1)
Cyberwarfare is against Cyberlaw (Score:1)
now your breaking my CyberLaw [slashdot.org]
Government and cyberwarfare (Score:2)
Politics and the English Language (Score:2)
Translation: "Not knowing what we're doing could fuck things up." Orwell [orwell.ru] would like to have a word with you...
Perhaps countries should obey non-Cyber laws first (Score:2)
For example, in 1986 the World Court condemned the US for its terrorist
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