Comments on: Cyber Arms Control

By: North Face Jacket rr

North Face Jacket rr — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:54:49 +0000

North Face Jacket North Face The North Face Discount North Face Cheap North Face Jacket Cheap North Face Discount North Face Jacket

By: Brian B

Brian B — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:14:07 +0000

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.

By: Effeminem

Effeminem — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:59:37 +0000

Meanwhile, cryptoanarchy dreams its dreams of grandeur.

By: Charles

Charles — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:34:49 +0000

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.

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:44:58 +0000

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.….

By: Aygar

Aygar — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:51:29 +0000

@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

By: Byron Skinner

Byron Skinner — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:07:20 +0000

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

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:54:15 +0000

This also sounds like a good way to infringe upon free speech, under the guise of national security.

By: Valcan

Valcan — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:31:33 +0000

No, because no one is dumb enough to believe there neighbor or enemies would stop.

By: Nidi

Nidi — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:29:16 +0000

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.