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Microsoft Calls For 'Digital Geneva Convention' (usatoday.com)
Microsoft is calling for a digital Geneva Convention to outline protections for civilians and companies from government-sponsored cyberattacks. In comments Tuesday at the RSA security industry conference in San Francisco, Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said the rising trend of government entities wielding the internet as a weapon was worrying. From a report on USA Today: In the cyber realm, tech must be committed to "100% defense and zero percent offense," Smith said at the opening keynote at the RSA computer security conference. Smith called for a "digital Geneva Convention," like the one created in the aftermath of World War II which set ground rules for how conduct during wartime, defining basic rights for civilians caught up armed conflicts. In the 21st century such rules are needed "to commit governments to protect civilians from nation-state attacks in times of peace," a draft of Smith's speech released to USA TODAY said. This digital Geneva Convention would establish protocols, norms and international processes for how tech companies would deal with cyber aggression and attacks of nations aimed at civilian targets, which appears to effectively mean anything but military servers.
If you want peace you need to start by committing not to attack the other side, only to ever defend yourself.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Just as long as.... as unleashing Clippy on the world is deemed a war crime.
Why not a "digital land mine treaty" while we're at it?
Perhaps there's a good reason to call it a 'digital Geneva Convention' - It's basically a nice guideline to point to that the US browbeats others with, only to fail to ratify into law and enforce themselves.
Without an enforcement body, this is meaningless. Who would you trust to enforce it anyway, MICROSOFT? Why not just call it a digital waste of time.
How do you enforce a digital Geneva convention?
You unfriend any nation state from your nation's facebook page if they break the convention? The regular Geneva Convention is hard enough to enforce, a digital one will be even harder because it's harder to prove an actor is really from a location or nation. Even if an assailant traced back to Russia is caught breaking the convention online and Russia "fails to catch" the person responsible they can claim he was a Ukrainian acting on behalf of Ukraine from within their borders.
Even the regular Geneva Convention isn't really respected anymore. You've got the US brazenly violating it in Gitmo. Iraqi troops during the gulf war were violating it. No-one really takes it seriously anymore.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch