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Cyber War Manual Proposes Online Geneva Convention
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."
The organization that allows massacres to take place right in front of them, even though they say they are supposed to stop such things.
we already have enough reasons to go to war,
how about we find ways to foster peace,
war takes money from the mouths of children,
why dont we just spend it on education?
So when the Chinese hack America from an infected Swiss machine the US will bomb Switzerland? From outside it looks like that the military class has a disproportionately large influence in American politics.
These people still do not understand the basics of networked systems. Adherence to this proposed list requires several things which are absent on the global telecommunications networks. First, determining who's attacking. In conventional warfare, attributation is easy: They're wearing distinctive uniforms. Computer viruses and malware doesn't have an embedded flag in it to tell you which government sent it, and even if it did, it couldn't be trusted. Second, attacks that are meant to go after one thing can inadvertently hit something else (collateral damage). This is usually geographically-based in the real world... if a hospital happens to be next to a military munitions depot, umm, oops? But online, the hospital could be in another country and yet still be hit by the attack, because its digital signature is similar to the actual target. Either it's on the same network, or has a similar network address, or even a simple one character typo, is all it takes to send a "cyber bomb" (gags) veering off target. And last, but not least... you can have all the countries on Earth sign this and it still leaves out the guns for hire, the mercenaries. The A-Teams of the digital world: Freelancers. They don't have to go by your rules, and if a hospital happens to have a juicy source of personal information that could be turned into cash through extortion, blackmail, or reselling, they may just decide to go for it.
This document underscores just how little our military and political leaders understand about this new theatre of war. They're drafting up treaties without even knowing where the borders are yet.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
They might leak and make a mess. And electric grids, boy, that would be inconvenient. And not water treatment plants, or traffic signals. And not banks or shops, either.
The Geneva Convention worked (mostly) because there were mutual prisoners of war who could be mistreated, and horrific effects all around from mustard gas. If Anonymous could post flashing GIFs on an epileptic support group web site for teh lulz, what makes anyone think an attacker will stop at a hospital's firewall?
John
Can't all these generals just get on World of Warcraft of whatever online game and fight each other there, instead of wasting everyone's money on using our internet as their newest play yard?
you can only poke the bear for so long.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I say dams are legitimate targets.
Isn't it interesting that as we become more "civilized" and come up with rules for war, we have more of them?
I think if we bring back the Roman way - kill everyone down to the last man woman and baby, tourch the city and salt the Earth - maybe we'd have less wars.
Yep ... and here we are with our 10th aniversary of the Iraq war.
Yes siree. We're so civilized.
The UN has no credibility.
War is War, and War should be fought to be won, at all costs.
We've watered down the concept of War to the point that we too easily run off and start one because it's not really War anymore.
If War really meant War, we wouldn't start one unless the objective was to actually fight and win a war.
War means you shoot and bomb the everliving shit out of your enemy until you obtain complete and utter capitulation and compliance with your terms.
War does NOT mean you blow up a few military targets here and there to make a fucking point.
Don't weaponize the internet.
We have seen how bad weaponizing space can be.
This is why we can't have nice things. Keep hacking illegal and spend those billions on cracking down on those who violate the 'peace'. No one wants to be the cyber-south Africa and give up their cybernukes. We should resist and draw down the militarization.
Captcha: Lawgiver
I don't believe any of the hype I hear on the news about the "Cyber War". Is it real?
I just don't see how they can claim that power grids, and other critical infrastructure are as vulnerable as they say, especially when the fix is easy: Take them off the public Internet.
So are hospitals, IMHO.
In fact, in any war, Hospitals should be the FIRST things blown the smithereens. Then, your enemy has no hospitals - no way to treat anyone who is injured - and will absolutely have to surrender because any other option means slow, painful deaths for their citizens.
Hospitals, dams, power gen, water treatment, bridges, and schools should all be the very first targets destroyed in any war.
What, should the main page return a "Red Cross" or a "Red Crescent" or an appropriate meta-tag on a web-site's front page in order for it to qualify as an "off-limits" target? Will it be like saying "hey they're not really soldiers 'cause they're not wearing a uniform with patches 'n' shit!" forgetting that the USA's minute-men and civilian militia were definitely a rag-tag bunch of townies who also wore no uniform, while King George's men had their beautiful red-coats!
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Has the USA turned ourselves into the British colonial empire building with our own red-coats? Why would anyone think the USA would follow a NATO directive or another Geneva convention about "cyber-warfare" when the USA is currently unwilling to follow the already agreed-to Geneva Convention against torture and extra-ordinary rendition and recognition of the sovereignty of other states?
Everyone just breaks these sorts of rules whenever they feel like. It just provides an excuse to attack other countries shrouded in contrived legitimacy. If we want to attack a country for hacking into a dam we'll do it. If other countries want to be mad at us or even retaliate, they will do that. Pretending that we are just following some coherent rules is a joke, and this should be transparent to everyone.
Here is how this works:
1. We do what we want. This is the most important part. Example countries like Axistan are there for our benefit.
2. We invent rules giving us justification for attacking other countries and removing justification from other countries to attack us. Example A: Axistan is bad because they cyber attacked our hospitals and dams. We need to destroy them. Example B: Axistan attacked us for cyber attacking them, but since we attacked just about everything except their hospitals and dams, their retaliation was unjust and therefore they are the initial aggressors and now we must destroy them.
3. We pretend these rules are fair and implicitly agreed to by all other countries. Any country that would not agree to these terms is surely an evil country that gets what's coming to them anyway. So even though Axistan never agreed to this rule, we can still punish them for violating it.
4. When it doesn't work out the way we expected, and we need to break our own rules, that's ok because we still have all the guns, and the American people have a short memory. Oops it turns out we needed to cyber attack one of Axistan's dams. That's fine we'll just invent some reason why it was justified. You mean Axistan somehow managed to cyber attack us without hitting any hospitals or dams? Well lets just invent some reason why it actually broke our rules and lets attack them anyway.
All of this political bullshit is designed to trick a gullible American public that those in charge are righteous in our actions. I think this is giving far too much credit to the average American's ability to think critically. We can skip most of this show and dance. It would be less insulting to the intelligence of all involved if we just said "We're taking your stuff because we want to and we are bigger."
In a lot of ways we never really evolved past the politics of the playground. We just wear suits and use expendable high school kids with m-16s and m-1 tanks to pick on the other kids. We are a bully. But that's the way the world is. There are no adults to make us play nice or punish us. We're all bullies or victims or both. It's lord of the flies on a macro scale.
Deliberate targeting of civilian assets is a well established violation of the laws of war.
Even when done accidentally it's considered collateral damage and in cases of profound recklessness the aggressing party may be liable for reparations.
"Laws of War" is an oxymoron.
WW2 was not won by following "laws of war." It was won by dropping nuclear fucking weapons on civilian targets. It was won by fucking carpet bombing Dresden and a dozen other German cities.
If WW2 were fought following today's "'laws of war," we'd all be eating sauerkraut and speaking German.
So it's not ok to hack Hospitals and Dams, but it's fine to drop bombs on them?
Since when were they off the table for war? They blew up German dams in WW2.
There wouldn't be any Jews left either.
Unless you properly win the war and there is no party left to pay reparations.
The Hermit Kingdom's obsession with propaganda and rewriting history, and common language and history with South Korea, seems to make it ideal for a "backdoor" cultural attack.
The modern equivalent of a propaganda leaflet drop. Smuggle, or even airdrop, OLPC-style satellite receivers into North Korea, able to receive dedicated Korean language info dumps from suitable satellites, as well as rebroadcasted live radio and (power willing) TV channels. News, music, live weather, etc. (And dedicated counter-propaganda channels.) And encyclopedias, text books, banned poetry/history/music, stored on the devices. Modular, repairable, with solar panels and crank-generators repurposeable to reduce the number of units turned in or destroyed.
Designed in South Korea, manufactured in China, a few hundred thousand units per year. Bargain.
[Designed well, they could be more generally suited to the poorest parts of the world. Charities might buy them, increasing the production size, reducing the per-unit costs.]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Fighting dirty in a war tends to piss off the world at large and is very costly in terms of international relations. Which in turn has strategic implications if you need their support in the future, or if they may choose to retaliate out of principle.
As an example, I cite how the Holocaust was the main factor resulting in the Nuremberg trials.
Hitting someone below the belt is a good way to bring your opponent down, but your victory will be short lived if you get an army of outraged fans climbing the ropes to poke your eyes out.
Would there have been Nuremberg trials if Germany took over Europe?
Or try not using Windows ...
> Fighting dirty in a war tends to piss off the world at large and is very costly in terms of international relations.
I dunno... it worked pretty well for American rebels during the Revolutionary War against Britain. British military leaders had their hands tied and were forced to fight in a "respectable" manner so as to avoid antagonizing the (presumably, and as a matter of fact, mostly) content loyalists who were either ambivalent or happy under British rule. The fact of the matter is, Americans basically *invented* the concept of asymmetric guerrilla warfare. It's how a group of poorly-armed amateurs managed to beat the crap out of one of the mightiest empires the world has ever seen. George Washington didn't cross the Delaware wearing an immaculate uniform and photo-ready (pretending they had cameras) wig that would have made a member of Britain's House of Lords envious... truth be told, he probably looked more like Che Guevara in a ragged winter coat.
Half the reason why the British walked away from the American Revolution and let us have our way was because their entire government pretty much took for granted that we'd be buried up to our ears in shit and squalor within a decade, and BEGGING them to take us back. We ultimately proved them wrong, of course, but their arrogance wasn't entirely unwarranted. When news of the Civil War reached London, people were taking bets over how many days it would be until the Confederacy went bankrupt & had delegates heading to London to seek protection from the North as British Territories, or maybe as a new Dominion.
American history has been very, VERY extraordinarily whitewashed & sanitized over the past 100 years. The truth is a lot grittier than most of us will ever realize. To a large extent, we fought dirty, then hit the jackpot and became fabulously wealthy from natural resources that were almost embarrassingly abundant compared to just about anywhere else in the world.
Well there wouldn't be a US if we hadn't fought dirty against the Brits.
Obviously the US does not follow the Geneva Convention that we whine about incessantly. An electronic Geneva Convention would hardly be honored by us and it certainly would not be followed by other nations including gangs of terrorists.
If we followed any civilized protocols Bradley Manning would not have been kept nude and isolated nor would we have tortured prisoners or asked anything of them other than their names. We also would not have used quite a few weapons of war such as shotguns in Vietnam.
Matter of fact the Unibomber was subjected to savage experiments by the CIA through a psychologist named Murray at Harvard well before he lashed out and became a killer. Apparently we should not have him as a prisoner at all as the very idea of the experiment was to overwhelm an unstable person and see how he reacted. Well we did find out what can happen if you break a man's mind.
So, following that line of reasoning, if someone cuts my cable and hacks my bank account I have the right to kill them? Um....no.
Sure, but Joe and Winston would have been the ones on trial.
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.