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Pentagon Says Cyberattacks Can Count As Act of War
suraj.sun tips news that the Pentagon has decided computer sabotage originating from another country can be classified as an act of war. "The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to US nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military." This news comes only days after the Chinese military admitted the existence of a team of cyberwarriors. "The report will also spark a debate over a range of sensitive issues the Pentagon left unaddressed, including whether the US can ever be certain about an attack's origin, and how to define when computer sabotage is serious enough to constitute an act of war. These questions have already been a topic of dispute within the military."
They took down our farmville time, we should risk the lives of our troops and murder their civilians in retribution!
anything is an excuse to go to war. since when did they need to specify?
It's utterly reasonable, although it's going to be exceptionally difficult to separate government actions from those of civilians. Who wants to bet that this will, sooner or later, be used as an excuse for invasion?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If attacking an american military installation via the internet is deemed an act of war, then surely exposing it on such a vulnerable network in the first place must count as treason. I mean, who would knowingly place such a valuable (and apparently, easily accessed) facility that's so vital to the defence of the country, in such danger of attack in the first place?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The USA fights anything with military force. Be it international justice, drugs, terrorists or whatever.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
From TFA
"If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," said a military official.
Things that America does don't count though, right?
The internet hasn't changed the fact that if someone doesn't want to be tied to an 'attack' they can make it hard to tell it was them, or even look like it was someone else.
Chinese hackers using systems located in Russia to hack NSA assets is just as hard to 'prove' as China launching a Russian made ICBM from a submarine disguised as Russian in a location the Russians would likely use etc. Unless the person who attacks you basically tells you they did it to your face (and even then potentially) you're making a judgement as to what happened based on evidence.
Call me daft, by all means, but for some reason I am incredulous that critical systems should be vulnerable to cyber attack. It just feels like something went very wrong at the design stage to allow this to happen. But then I'm not a developer...
I thought they usually had problems tracing these kind of attacks anyway because they can be routed through tons of proxies.
Continually at War with some group, product, or idea since 1941.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The USA & Israel jointly developed the Stuxnet worm and launched it against the Iranian nuclear facilities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
In the first documented and well-confirmed act of cyber-warfare, does this mean that both the USA and Israel have declared war against Iran, and that Iran would be in its rights to strike back at targets in both countries and kill people there?
Gee, this is all we need, yet another war on top of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.
So if a citizen of China, Russia, or Zimbabwe originates a successful (or even mildly irritating) attack against the US government, they will see it as an act of war?
I didn't read TFA, but looks like them terrists can spark a war by simply hacking via *name your country here* proxy.
Let's say that isn't even the case, does the Pentagon think that an international cyber attack is going to just come from an address registered to chinacyberwardivision.cn?
This seems shaky at best to declare war on phantoms... then again it falls right in line with the last decade.
Something witty.
What about SEAL Team 6 invading Pakistan?
The military has its own private network for the real important stuff.
Hence the comment in 2004 by then President Bush about "rumors on the internets that we're going to have a draft". He was referring to the public Internet, the Armed Forces internet, and any organization using an internet on 10.*.
Spam is a problem. All these malware infections too. And it is often next to impossible to trace the real origins of these attacks. Are we preparing to lock down the internet to fight a nebulous foe? "War on Cyber-terrorism?" Funny that the government doesn't seem interested in regulating the money trail these scammers and malware pushers use.
Step 1: Declare computer attacks an act of war Step 2: Claim any entity you don't like is "hacking" you Step 3: Since "hacking" is all technical mumbo jumbo it doesnt matter if you can't prove shit. The president would never lie, would he? Step 4: Bomb the shit out of whoever the bad guys de jour are. Step 5: Shitloads of profit for the military industry, not so much for those who are footing the bill.
Football Odds
Translation: We're too dumb to fight fire with fire, so we'll do what we know best...KILL KILL KILL!
on Iran? Stuxnet was a deliberate attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure.
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
" how to define when computer sabotage is serious enough to constitute an act of war. ."
How is this any different from the current situation? The US went to war in Iraq on the flimsiest of pretexts. The Bush administration ginned up the supposed threat that Iraq would have nuclear weapons in a very short time and we had to act NOW! Are we to start a war because we think that a hacking attack is immanent?
We already have the talent, it just needs to be focussed on somebody else than US :P
so the chain debt can be wiped out for them hacking us!?
Doesn't Congress declare war. Isn't the Predisent commander in chief? Why are we letting the military decide what is and what isn't an act of war? Seriously, this strikes me as dangeraous! What happens when the pentagon declares somethig an act of war and the president decideds it is not? Can the military decide that the president is in on it and unilaterally launch a war?
This is bad.
...can a foreign power do damage to "nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines" via a cyber attack? Seriously, I want to know, this is not a rhetorical question. Are their computer systems connected to an outside network or is there a someone on the inside (a la Stuxnet)?
. . . cyber attacks against U.S. targets originating from countries with rich oil reserves are on the rise.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
1. Hack a few computers in the country of your choice.
2. Use those machines to attack the Pentagon.
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
Since the Pentagon has such an expanded idea of "war," it's great to know that only Congress can declare war.
Oh, wait . . . .
You say that like its a bad thing.
The United States of America possesses the mightiest, most lethal fighting force in the history of the human civilization. If anything, I think they have been too restrained in their application of military force. I would favor more preemptive and swift action to prevent future attacks like this coming cyberwar
Hey, if China want to turn a blind eye to their 'patriotic hackers' and let them run riot, rather than doing the sensible thing, like keeping their powder dry, then let them. The West will ultimately benefit. We benefit from hardened systems and security practices, and push comes to shove, we'll be in much better shape. As it is, amateur Western hackers are learning Mandarin and running riot through Chinese systems. They are as vulnerable as hell.
I think the threat from China is overhyped. It's typically Chinese, all show -- no substance.
If you want to see what a REAL cyberattack looks like, then consider Stuxnet -- a threat orders of magnitude more sophisticated than anything out of China, and a glimpse of what a real 'cyberweapon' looks like.
Let's forget the myth of the Chinese being so ancient, wise and mighty -- because it's just that, a myth. The reality is that they're really just a bunch of amateur blowhards who are very, very wet behind the ears. The Chinese are cunning (as they always have), but they're not always so smart.
China is a paper tiger, and will be for the foreseeable future.
...but I find this kind of hard to take seriously, kind of like when the US government declared cryptography to be a form of munitions and imposed the same export controls.
Here's what I don't get: If someone maliciously attacks a physical base, fine. You can't lock down physical things entirely -- there's always the possibility of an inside man, or, say, a nuke. But these sorts of things, we already have ways of dealing with.
However, if someone can carry out a successful "cyberattack" from their home country, that says far, far more about our incompetence than it does about their ill intentions. Here, anything they exploit is either going to fall into the category of social engineering or espionage -- things we already have ways of dealing with in the real world -- or it's necessarily going to be a security hole we left wide open, one we certainly didn't have to.
I'm not trying to defend the asshat who exploits that, but it occurs to me that maybe responding to this as an "act of war" is entirely the wrong approach, and that the right approach is going to be similar to if you were to discover some mission-critical files which weren't being backed up, or some servers without a UPS or adequate cooling, or some secretary handed out a secret document without checking the person's clearance, and whatever you do, you don't make an international incident out of your own fuck-up.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The real problem is defense contractors that have all sorts of classified material on their computers. We could spent billions on defense related R&D and some third rate country might get that data and even might destroy our copy of the data while they are at it. Or even better, put a hidden bug in the design that will cause us grief when we try to use it in battle. (Of course, it could remain inactive until it is activated by an enemy.)
...our Military itself, and the fact that they repeatedly fail computer security audits year after year. Perhaps conversely it should be considered an act of Treason to perpetuate the lack of security around our critical systems, and hold those accountable who are refusing to spend the money to resolve the issues.
Yeah, I know I'm not the popular guy here asking the Government to actually spend MORE money, but some things need blatant and obvious attention, and allowing our country to go to war because their Windows 98 systems got hacked isn't the answer. I promise that any re-work of computer systems will be cheaper than any war we're pushed (or choose) to engage in. We've pretty much proven than beyond any doubt with the last decade worth of war on terror.
is not to play.
US Air Force General Kevin Chilton, head of US Strategic Command, has said that attacks on the United States via the Internet could merit a conventional military response.
“I don’t think you take anything off the table. We’re particularly looking toward one group in Seattle.”
The Seattle-based insurgent group is thought to have seeded American government and military computers with millions of copies of malware that allows attackers easy access to any data stored on the computer, or indeed to take complete control of the computer and use it for their own ends as part of a massive “botnet” to mount further attacks. The malware, “Windows,” makes securing a computer running it almost impossible.
“Turning Seattle into a glass crater would only be undertaken strictly as the minimum required surgical military action,” emphasised Chilton, “and not in any way out of twenty-five years’ bitter resentment and frustration at computing machinery.”
Chilton stressed that members of the US military must begin to think of their computers as the front lines. “Do you realize that in addition to adding Windows to computers, why, there are studies underway to Windowsize salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream! I can no longer sit back and allow Windows infiltration, Windows indoctrination, Windows subversion and the international enterprise licensing conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!”
The Obama administration is currently reviewing the United State’s cyberspace defense policy. “We’re considering all options thoroughly,” said the President, closing his MacBook and looking lingeringly at the red button on his desk.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
when are they going after M$? They have been attacking us for 20+ years! ha! (hey it's slashdot.. someone had to take a shot at M$)
Performing acts of war is not the same as declaring war on someone, youre giving the other side a valid causus belli upon which they decide to or not to act upon.
and how to define when computer sabotage is serious enough to constitute an act of war.
O, that's easy, we just need to devise a easy to understand color coded threat chart:
Isn't Echelon a permanent cyber-attack ?
What about that virus in the Iran nuclear program ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
"You missed. ... Boot to the head."
And you thought you knew what your kids were doing in their bedrooms at night.
That should be the question. If it's state supported, then aggressive acts against the US should leave the option of reprisal, be they physical or virtual. However, as often is the case, the power of the state is waning and more often homeless smaller groups are posing as the real threat. You can declare war on drugs or Al Qaeda or other non-state elements all you like, but all it really amounts to is a way to justify to your people that you're cutting their resources/services to go after something with military force. The doctrine is meaningless unless you plan to go up against another recognized country.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
1. They are making a case for more funding to combat "cyberterrorism".
2. To a hammer everything looks like a nail. To the Pentagon everything look like war.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ...
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So now if some script kiddie, including a US citizen attempts to hack into a US govt system do they now become labeled as "illegal combatants" or "terrorists" subject to having all of their civil rights revoked since our government has declared that "terrorists have no rights"?
Personally I think that any country that hides and shelters a terrorist that kills thousands and thousands of the civilians would be considered an act of war. Pakistan should consider itself lucky that its only got a small slap on the wrist by the USA navy seals.
You mean like this guy? This is a guy as bad as Osama, but he just happens to cooperate with the CIA and with "US interests". There are 100s of deaths directly linked to him including bombing of a passenger airliner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Posada_Carriles
So is this a little inconvenient truth? Or do you stick with your assertions?
Because that means we performed an act of war against Iran with the release of that Virus...
When you open a box, it's not a one way street... Your enemies get to use your excuses as well.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Pentagon: Trust us, they attacked us. Really it was them and they did do it.
Why did the towers turn into dust again?
"If a cyber attack produces the death, damage, destruction or high-level disruption that a traditional military attack would cause, then it would be a candidate for a 'use of force' consideration, which could merit retaliation."
So just hacking into a system would NOT merit an armed response. Might merit a retaliation in kind, however.
Also, not all cyber-attacks would be over the internet. Not all systems that are networked are reachable over the internet. The internet itself runs over other networks, but they often aren't reachable from the internet.
Best Slashdot Co
Sad but absolutely true, as history has proven over and over again.
Where political power exists, political power will be leveraged for profit. The only way to stop this is to shrink the pyramid -- reduce the level of power. Which of course just doesn't happen in the business of government.
The Pentagon doesn't decide what is an act of war, the voters decide through their elected representatives. This is pretty dangerous stuff where the military leadership starts defining and campaigning for what they consider to be an act of war.
Only when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs gets suckered into a 419 scam.
Think more deeply for a moment. The meat of this issue is not that the US is suddenly comfortable with bombing somebody's router when it threatens their power grid -- every country whose infrastructure is worth protecting already has this in their contingency plans. The real news is that the US is SAYING it and making it explicitly clear.
For those of you who still think in terms of moralities in geopolitics, I don't know what to tell you except grow up -- realpolitik defines the world beyond your Matrix-like construct of adversarial relationships. Brinkmanship is the name of the game and posturing with threat and counter-threat is how you play.
What this news indicates is that the Pentagon is not yet confident in its network anti-intrusion and counter-intrusion abilities. It therefore must reinforce its current posture with the next best tools it has available, i.e. its conventional arsenal. Or rather, the perceived threat of its conventional arsenal. Let this sink in and think back to the times past where China, Iran, Russia, even EU nations publicly highlighted an aggressive change to their doctrine, be they political, economic, or military.
It was all at moments of perceived weakness.
The Pentagon is very much aware of its own weakness in network security right now, and so a defensive gambit like this is how they maintain enemy reluctance in order to buy time until military and civilian cyber-security doctrine and operational procedure is brought up to standard, at which time you will see a lessening of this sort of rhetoric -- perhaps even seeing this stricken from official doctrine ('course you should never assume that anything is ever off the table). In short, this is more of an attempt to keep a defensive status quo than an offensive escalation.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
This makes me wonder about insurance claims since I believe that most insurance companies won't pay if an incident is classified as an act of war. A quick Google search turned up this, and this.
Time to offend someone
So does that mean, in assuming that America help design the Stuxnet virus then America is technically at war with Iran?
And when a countries oil supply is wanted under American control, they will come up with 'evidence' of a cyber attack which will allow them to invade THAT country.
;-)
Just remove all phrases of WMD and input CYBER ATTACK into old documents and speeches: heck, bring back Bush and he can just reuse his old speeches.
'and if you ain't with us, yer again' us.'
wow.
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
This is the United States' justification for its next war. It lets them simply say that $annoying_foreign_power is hacking their interwebs and send troops, with no evidence necessary to justify it (since revealing details of internal networks would be "counter to our National Security interests.")
Very convenient.
all the the weapons coming into Iraq for the insurgency comes from Iran and Syria(Iran's puppet)... the US has been at war with Iran since 1979. we just haven't had the balls to step up and win it.
This reminds me of an episode of Star Trek. (I think it was Star Trek, I know it was a space show). This particular space system was at war. Only it was all computer based. And it a town was hit by a bomb in the computer battle, all the people in the REAL town had to report to a location and be put to death for real (by some quick and painless means). This was the humane way to have war.
This whole concept of turning cyberspace into a literal space where wars can be waged and so forth is a few steps away from such an existence basically happening. Where everyone must comply with what some computer dictates (as decided by powers that be behinds the scenes.) Then we'll be living in a true life idocracy. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
Gov't of country A does a cyberattack against country C, sourced from inside and designed to look like it originates in country B.
Country C declares war on Country B. Country C and Country B duke it out, tear each other up, in protacted war, and once they are both weak enough, Country A swoops in and conquers them both with minimal resistance.
Dear Representative:
We should not go to war over a cyber crime that does not cost the lives of American Citizens. We should not go to war over drugs, we should not go to war over oil prices, we should not go to war over a conflict that is unlikely to cost American lives. We are not the world police, we do not have a morally superior nation, our way is not the only correct way.
We should go to war to save American lives. Including the lives of our soldiers. I understand that it is not always easy to determine when a situation is going to result in the deaths of Americans, and in those cases I'd like you to pursue diplomatic means until you determine that there is a clear and present danger to American lives that outweighs the risk of death you intend to inflict upon our soldiers.
Thank you,
-Daryen.
So.... a compromised rack of servers in Michigan will get you a nice missle strike? No thanks. IPs can be spoofed, connection logs tampered with and tracks covered up. It sounds like another "Gee we didn't check our data close enough" scenarios waiting to happen.
It would take the likes of a forensic expert who is a cross between Columbo, Chuck Norris and Bruce Schneier in order to have any credibility to base an act of war on and that person would not be working at SAIC, NSA or the Pentagon. That person is the one who pwned you.
What you end up with is the mess that Iran is in right now. They want to be plenty pissed at Israel and the US, so it's very easy for someone to put whatever they want in their server logs and point a finger. You want to go to war with that info?
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
This is interesting, but the premise of the story is old news. There were reports on this when the White House report came out came close to two weeks ago. Some relevant quotes: Countries “have an inherent right to self-defense that may be triggered by certain aggressive acts in cyberspace ... When warranted, the United States will respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country."
http://joshuaphilipp.com/2011/05/us-faces-a-long-road-in-implementing-new-cyberstrategies/
Also, the Chinese regime openly announced its cyberwarfare command back in July 2010, and it's cyberwarfare units have been known about as early as 2003. A relevant quote:
"The stated missions of the new cyber base appear to complement the PLA's information warfare (IW) units, which the PLA has been developing since at least 2003. The PLA's IW strategy was largely spearheaded by Major General Dai Qingmin, then-director of the PLA’s electronic warfare department (Fourth Department), who advocated a comprehensive information warfare effort (Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2009)."
http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=36658&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=7&cHash=4b1746fecc
Adding to this though, it will be interesting to see how much the U.S. actually enforces its new cyberstratey, given that government networks and critical infrastructure are almost constantly hit with cyberattacks from state actors. Back in 2007, Netwarcom was already saying cyber conflicts with China was already at the level of "campaign-style, force-on-force engagement."
http://www.grc.com/sn/files/FCW_on_%20Cyber_Warefare.pdf
I think the key point to keep in mind is that the attacks have to be proportional to that of a traditional conventional military attack. The Pentagon isn't going to drop a cruise missile on some kid because he launched a DDoS attack on a .mil website; that's about the equivalent to that same kid spray painting a recruitment office at night or at most getting a bunch of friends to protest in front of it. They're talking about serious and substantial attacks, the sort that brings down the power grid and blows up infrastructure for which things like Stuxnet merely represent the tip of the iceberg. These sorts of attacks aren't going to be launched by junior accidentally from the basement but are sophisticated and coordinated efforts by governments and organized movements that are deliberately out to destroy and possibly take life.
Sure any transgression can count as an act of war but doing so carries a risk of not being taken seriously as a deterrent when you really need to make that claim and have it be taken deadly serious.
Currently every time NK or Iran asserts some sanction against them as an act of war they are ignored.
USG should work to mitigate any possibility of misunderstanding caused by unecessary dillution of the term.
At the end of the day there is little reason to classify methods of attack. It should be the damage caused by any attack of any kind which guides the response.
This is a dangerous idea on more than one level. Other commentators on Slashdot have already pointed out the warped sense of equivalence, that a "cyber attack" may be responded to with violent attacks costing human lives. What constitutes a cyber attack could be very vague. The origins of cyber attacks are also equally vague and easy to fake. Responding to cyber attacks with warfare opens up a floodgate for all kinds of insane false flag operations. No longer will we have to blow our own stuff up in order to have an excuse to go to war with another country, but rather we can just say we've been cyber attacked (zomg). Think it won't happen? The Bush administration lied through its teeth and faked "intelligence" to the nth degree just because it wanted to invade Iraq. At the time nobody really understood just how fake the information was.
Interestingly, the United States itself is the leader in cyber warfare, having already launched an attack on Iran via computer virus. It was a virus of the likes that no one had ever seen before, and the amount of damage it was meant to cause is also unprecedented in the history of computing, as it was programmed to actually destroy industrial equipment, possibly (in extreme circumstances) at the cost of human life.
Some company in Redmond should be punished for the now almost worthless US virtual defenses in every layer.
This way an up and coming South American country can hack computers in the US and China, attack China from the US, and the US from China and start WWIII. Then clean up in the power void from two super powers having just nuked themselves into the stone age.
So did Israel just commit an act of war against Iran, by attacking its nuclear systems?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
This article shows an interesting difference between the Military and Big Business when it comes to anything computer related.
For decades now, Big Business has treated computer related offenses as far greater offenses than their real world counterparts.
However, it takes the Military decades to treat computer related offenses as actual combatively hostile actions worthy of an armed response.
I fully support a War on Spam, and would like to see the CIA's Predator drones re-tasked with the bombing of those involved in spamming. :)
Being able to tell the difference between state-sponsored cyberwar and non-state actors using DDOS attacks for the lulz could be difficult.
What if the non-state actors were primarily located in one country? Is that country then responsible for their actions?
Sure, it's much cheaper and easier to fake cyberattack to have an excuse to invade some country -.-
-- All Gods were immortal.
-- S. Lem
...when it suits the US military's desire for a pretext to attack someone.
Back when I was still on active duty, I was a staff weenie on a 3 star Navy staff. One day I came into work, fired up my SIPRNET terminal (SIPRNET being the SECRET-level network in use by the military). I opened up my mail, and there it was: FM: COL Chesty Puller, USMC (name changed, obvs). SUBJ: I love you
I knew COL Puller and I was pretty sure he didn't actually love me, so I didn't open it. Turned out to be a smart move. Someone had, against policy, moved some infected files from an internet-connected machine to the SIPRNET, and it was on: Half our SIPRNET machines were OOC for several days while the IT folks purged the ILoveYou virus from them.
So, yeah, it happens. Usually because of stupid user problems.
... that the US is going to obtain proof before they decide to attack on this basis, I've got some swampland to sell you. Exhibit A: Iraq. Reason for invading: non-existent "weapons of mass destruction". That we pretty well knew were non-existent before we started.
So forgive me if I don't bother providing proof that the US/Israel unleashed Stuxnet.
George W. Bush sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers to Iraq in an unprovoked attack, killing (conservatively) many thousands of Iraqi civilians. Obviously an act of war, and, as it turned out, a wholly unjustified one. The US government continues to shelter Mr. Bush in Dallas. So, clearly, you think it must be legitimate for a Saddam loyalist group to infiltrate the US and kill him, right? No? I guess you understand the double standard pretty well then.
Cyberattacks are as less an act of war than congress revoking our God-given rights that are guaranteed under the Bill of Rights.
Establishing a foreign policy is vital to setting boundaries with foreign countries. I spent the last 6 years as an Officer in the US Army. Without a doubt the security of our SIPRNET is dependent on internal security policies, but as with any system connected in some form to the internet, it cannot be 100% secure. Perfect example would be the Stuxnet virus that brought Iran's refining capabilities to its knees.
It's not necessary to assume that the response to a cyber attack from a foreign country will involve bombs and bullets. The military responds with proportionality to attacks against its infrastructure. A cyber attack from a foreign country will likely be responded with a cyber attack against that same country. Ultimately this declaration of cyber attacks being considered an act of war simply lays the ground work for a lawful and political response.
It's important to remember that the purpose of a cyber attack is to either steal sensitive data or destroy data and/or related infrastructures. With the purpose being to gain an advantage over the targeted country. This is at its base an act of war. While there is little chance that someone would be physically harmed from the attack, the intent of the attack is to gain the ability to cause physical harm to the target country.
If there is no God then free will is an illusion.
Read this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/09/osama-bin-laden-us-pakistan-deal
The U.S. and Pakistan agreed in secret 10 years ago that if Bin Laden was tracked down in Pakistan, the U.S. would be allowed to go in and get him, and then Pakistan would publically complain about it. The agreement was reached in 2001 between Musharraf and G.W. Bush. Musharraf renewed the agreement in 2008 during the "transition to democracy", while he was still president.
Meet the new and improved false-flag operation: no operation necessary!
There have been quite a few things just in the past couple of years that could be construed as an act of war without escalating to the point of a real war. North Korea sunk a South Korean ship and launched an artillery barrage on one of their islands and that didn't result in a return to war. Pakistan could easily construe the US actions on the boarder regions and in the assassination of bin Laden to be acts of war, but they haven't started a war with the US over it.
Acts of war are just provocations that rise to the level that nations think they justify starting a war over them. But quite a bit of the time nations don't go to war over things they say could justify a war because they don't think it would be in their interest to do so. This can range from relatively minor provocations to very serious ones like the aforementioned unprovoked sinking of of ships and shelling of your territory.
Iran Contra affair? arms to get our people back... not sure that constitutes "not at war" or contradicts my point. if there were arms deals after the hostages were released please enlighten me...