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Cyberwarfare in International Law
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.'"
I dare say that any "cyberwarrior" would not have a recognizable uniform, and as such, would probably be classed as an 'enemy combatant' by the gov't...which gives me the screaming blue creevles, given the gov't's current attitude towards anyone they suspect to be such an 'enemy combatant'--Guantanamo Bay doesn't have broadband, does it? Will they torture this new class of enemy combatant by making them dial into AOL with a 300 baud modem on a keyboard with a broken shift/caps key?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
What stops a Saudi IslamoFascist living in Canada from buying malware from the Russian mafia and redirecting attacks through servers in China? Who do we attack when the attacker is a botnet consisting of a bunch of infected PCs on some UK cablemodem network?
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
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, strictly speaking, that's how the Geneva conventions are structured. If two countries go to war, the Geneva conventions only apply if both countries are signatories to the conventions.
So...what happens if the warring parties aren't even both countries. What if a country declares war on a tactic (e.g. "terrorism")? What if a country declares war on a loosely affiliated group of individuals who lack a defined leadership structure that could sign on to the Geneva Conventions on the group's behalf?
When it comes to the Bush administration, you end up with these weird double standards where the same individual is claimed to both fall outside the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions (no protections whatsoever) but also somehow have violated the terms of the Geneva Conventions (guilty of "war crimes").
Bottom line: the problems with international law go far beyond malicious use of the internet.
...when the packet you deliver to the datattackers is measured in kilotons, not kilobytes.
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.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
For example, the Hague Convention of 1899 prohibited dum-dum bullets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dum-dum#Law [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 military personel.
This is not to say that abuses do not occur -- there are no man-made laws that go unbroken. But there is indeed a large body of generally-followed war laws that keep the disgusting slaughter within some sort of order while it is occuring (important for maintaining troop dicipline if nothing else), shorten the post-war recouperation periods, and reducing (not removing) the revenge-headset of all sides.
Which I appreciate is difficult to wrap one's head around -- but war can in fact be much worse than it is, and would have been worse than it was during the last century. War laws are not simply a bad joke.
[1] Side-track time (geeks are in love with detail, after all) -- the wiki article is a little off in the WW1 reference. Once the conflict was well underway, the medics could certainly tell without confusion when dum-dum style rounds were in use. The records show spikes of such wounds on particular days in particular areas.
Research is indicating these were probably reversed-rounds -- alterations by the troops, rather than supply. It has a dum-dum effect, and it was useful against tanks, oddly enough. Regular rifle bullets shattered - the blunt end of a reverse-round acted like a die-punch against early armour, creating a hole. It's still unclear which effect was the intent and which the by-product.