The subject of international cyber arms control (ICAC) has risen in conversation around the beltway and beyond, and it’s an issue has polarized many in the technical and policy making communities.
The argument among experts revolves around whether an international cyber arms control treaty might reduce the plethora of criminal and national security threats, while promoting greater cyber security for all. The very first argument is that cyber crime should be handled separately than cyber warfare and cyber terrorism.
Once you get past that, there are those that firmly believe it is critical that an ICAC be developed and implemented as soon as possible given the increases we have seen in cyber attacks, cyber crime and the growing fear of cyber terrorism. Those opposed to the idea feel that implementing a cyber arms control treaty will be difficult and enforcing it will be nearly impossible due to the facts that no special materials are needed to create cyber weapons and all that is needed to manufacture a cyber weapon is a creative technical person and a computer that is connected to the Internet. The opposition is quick to point out that compliance verification and ongoing monitoring would require a level of openness for inspection that few governments would find acceptable.
What do you think?:
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I voted no because most of the nation states that would violate the treaty have the most to gain because it's what may give them an asymetric advantage against the US.
And that of course doesn't even include non-state actors who could care less about the world's convention like treaties and non-proliferation agreements.
So any attempt like this would fall flat on its face. That's not to say it doesn't make sense to not attempt some kind of "hot line" in case things do get heated up between let's say the US and China, but don't look to a treaty to prevent a nation from committing a "bolt out the blue" cyber strike. And that of course would lead to a reciprocal strike by the recipient of the surprise attack.
The tools used by cyber criminals and cyberwarfare are essentially the same. In many of the currently documented cyber attacks that have been reported to be under direction of a government entity utilized grassroots, civilian participants. Often times this will include people who would be considered criminal elements.
On top of this, in order to create defenses for cyber attacks, you gain the know-how of how to undertake these attacks, and the tools to do it. Cyber weapons arent like nukes, they are like tanks. There is no clear line distinguishing between an offensive and a defensive capability; just like tanks, they can be used for both. You also can't go out to a warehouse and count how many trojans or viruses a country has, like you can rifles.
Cyber warfare is a new type of battlefield using new,unconventional weapons and fought not by uniformed members of an armed service, but by an anomalous combatant. Conventional thinking will not work when addressing this problem.
@Nidi Your analogy can be extended by describing cyber weapons as like stone age spears then rather then like tanks. A stone age spear's components are ordinary sticks and rocks with many important non-military uses. And the sticks and rocks only become a problem when assembled in to a spear.
–Aygar
No, because no one is dumb enough to believe there neighbor or enemies would stop.
This also sounds like a good way to infringe upon free speech, under the guise of national security.
Good Morning Folks,
I voted no for many of the same reason stated above and one other, Cyber warfare is something that no state can claim to have control of even with in it’s borders. There are at least two reasons.
First is, what is Cyber Warfare? Really it’s almost undefineable, is some teenager blocking a wireless signal from a laptop, one state wanting to turn off the power grid of another state, is it a criminal organization busting into a financial institutions accounting system, is it competing drug cartels wanting to rob each others inventory.? Is it a military that uses cyber weapons to disable an enemies say air defense system, as the US did?
Secondly, such a treaty/ban would be unenforceable. By the time any sovereign could even determine that it had been attacked, the war would be over.
The only defense ,is to have as much proactive protection that you can develop in place that would provide a state with enough time to counter the threat, and then take strong decisive offensive action.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
I voted no on the grounds that it becomes largely unenforcable unless it involves massively invasive responsibility; pretty much all recorded cyber attacks are traced to a server in country X or country Y, but are supposedly carried out by ‘concerned patriots’ or some such phrase.
That may even be true.
As noted, cyber attack hardware is pretty easy to aquire or create and can be delivered from an internet cafe. Unless someone is dumb enough to launch a distributed denial of service from http://www.peoples_liberation_army_communications_warfare_office.com/destroy_the_capitalist_west or something equally stupid, you’re in exactly the same boat as with state-sponsored terrorism.
That then gets into the level of debate as to what responsibility a government has for the (online) actions of its citizens; you need to be able to point at national legislation saying ‘such and such a piece of software qualifies as a cyber weapon and is such illegal’. A treaty then forms a mutual agreement to having matching standards of such laws, and to actually enforce them.
If you can – that’s a big if, given that (with the way the internet works) I can have my ‘missile silo’ on a server that’s in neither my country nor the target’s.
Equally, if there is a specific form of ‘weapon’ that cannot realistically be created without government support (cruise missile analogue), then by all means, put that in a treaty. I doubt you’ll be able to come up with many.
The closest legal analogue is if I one day decide to start shooting up the Pentagon. Because I have an especially long-ranged gun (and I’m a very good shot), I’m able to do so without leaving my front room across the atlantic.
The bit of legislation you’re really after is an extradition treaty – so you can hauk me across the pond and try me under US law (in my case, of course, you have one – there is a UK-US mutual extradition treaty, which in the tradition of US extradition treaties only works in one direction…but that’s a different rant). However any country likely to be quietly encouraging its citizens to launch cyber attacks is probably not going to have such a treaty with the country it’s attacking.
“Cyber weapons arent like nukes, they are like tanks. You also can’t go out to a warehouse and count how many trojans or viruses a country has, like you can rifles. ”
No – that’s the other problem with something that’s basically just information; if you’ve got one, you can copy it an infinite number of times pretty much instantly and without effort. It’d be like having a non-proliferation agreement where holding the *design* for a weapon was illegal. Which is kind of awkward as the design has to be described in the legal document…..
I'd never work. With cyber weapons there's such a great degree of plausible deniability that most enemy will "hide" their weapons capability very easily.
Meanwhile, cryptoanarchy dreams its dreams of grandeur.
Would an International Cyber Arms Control Treaty Help Halt a Cyber War?
No it would not. Have nuclear arms control treaties reduced the threat of a nuclear war? Or fore a more direct comparison, have gun bans stopped gun crime anywhere?
Computer programs are tools, misused they can have devestating effects, however it is the misuse that is the issue, not the existance of the tool.
A treaty is just a clever way for other nations to use the law in order to obtain a level playing field with U.S. technological superiority.
We need not handicap ourselves for any reason.
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