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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."
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?
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.
Since when were they off the table for war? They blew up German dams in WW2.
Money is quite dirty and should never be fed to a child. It also has no nutritional benefits.
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.
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.