In recent years, offensive cyber operations have attracted significant interest from the non-Defense Department academic legal community, prompting numerous articles seeking to create a legal theory for cyber conflicts. At a time when the United States has already lost an estimated $4 trillion in intellectual property as a result of foreign cyber espionage, not to mention the loss of military advantage, focusing on what the United States cannot do in cyberspace only hinders efforts to defend the country from future cyber attack. The theoretical framework for an emerging cyber law under development by the legal community uses analogies from international law, such as the laws of the high seas and international commercial air treaties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For example, the vast majority of these academic legal scholars would require the United States ensure that malicious software attack only combatant systems and legitimate military targets, and not affect any other systems.<\/p>\n
While code can be targeted to a specific military system, that is no guarantee it will be limited because of the dual use of information technology. <\/p>\n
The legal perception of cyber is based on an assumption that actors are either civilian or military, but there is no such clear distinction in the militarized and contested digital world. <\/p>\n
In cyberspace, universities, municipal utilities, communication companies and other actors are a part of the war-fighting effort without clear boundaries to being civilian or military. If the U.S. became engaged in a cyber conflict with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, an organization that is a mix of crude arms manufacturing, terrorism training and soup kitchens for the poor, there is no way to ensure that a counter cyber attack would not affect the soup kitchens. But there is no territorial or international cyberspace as long as attribution is unsolved \u2014 and even with attribution solved, the answer to where, when and by whom is troublesome to answer.<\/p>\n
Applying laws of war that have origins in the 1800s, when massive armies fought on a field in broad daylight, in an abundance of object permanence, is not relevant to cyber when the contested space is changed, lost, created, reborn and redesigned in real time. <\/p>\n
Link: http:\/\/www.defensenews.com\/article\/20130217\/DEFFEAT05\/302170016\/Offensive-Cyber-Superiority-Stuck-Legal-Hurdles-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2708,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions\/2708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}