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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."
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
False flag operations are extremely risky, and don't happen as often as you would think.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Don't worry, China is on track to outpace the US in military expenditures by 2023. I'm sure that's all for "peaceful regional defense" and will have no impact on the US.
China's military rise
http://www.economist.com/node/21552212
The dragon's new teeth: A rare look inside the world's biggest military expansion
http://www.economist.com/node/21552193
Essential reading on China cyber:
The Online Threat: Should we be worried about a cyber war? (The first page of this is a must read wrt China.)
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/01/101101fa_fact_hersh
Great snippet: ""The N.S.A. would ask, 'Can the Chinese be that good?' " the former official told me. "My response was that they only invented gunpowder in the tenth century and built the bomb in 1965. I'd say, 'Can you read Chinese?' We don't even know the Chinese pictograph for 'Happy hour.'"
To say nothing of the more recent news.
But yes, yes...this is all about "false flag" attacks, because naturally the US is always the evil aggressor, and there has never been any oppression or tyranny in the world, save for what the US has foisted upon it. The principles of freedom for which the US stands are just an illusion force fed to a compliant public by the lapdog mainstream press. In fact, we probably have secret time machines so we could extend this evil beyond our nation's short existence in this world. That explains all the bad things that happened before we were around.