War, like any part of the human experience, is filled with shades of gray. Conflict comes on many levels. Conflicts between sociopolitical entities have entered a new era. Lawyers have begun debating the ethics of information systems infrastructure attacks.
Over the centuries, rules governing combat have been drawn together in customary practice as well as official legal documents, like the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter. These laws govern when it is legitimate to go to war, and set rules for how any conflict may be waged.
Two traditional military limits now are being applied to cyberwar: proportionality, which is a rule that, in layman’s terms, argues that if you slap me, I cannot blow up your house; and collateral damage, which requires militaries to limit civilian deaths and injuries.
“Cyberwar is problematic from the point of view of the laws of war,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School. “The U.N. Charter basically says that a nation cannot use force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other nation. But what kinds of cyberattacks count as force is a hard question, because force is not clearly defined.”
As a non-commissioned officer who makes a living centered on the feeding and care of information systems two thoughts spring to mind after reading about our great moral and ethical dilemmas related to fighting cyberwars.
- Collateral damage to information systems as the result of bungled or poorly planned information ops will have a high probability of creating more long-term problems than are solved – think about what happens when the SWAT drug lords break down the wrong door and shoot grandma or when an air force bomber hits the wrong target. Bad juju. If you’re fighting a war to win hearts and minds you have to operate with precision.
- Focusing on the ethics of cyberwar while Guantanamo Bay is still a prison camp is a fool’s errand. A man with a small cut on his finger and and an eyeball dangling from the socket should focus on treating the eyeball first and then worry about the finger. Unfortunately, we’re politically bankrupt so we’re focused on the finger instead of the eye.