Cyber Conflicts: Law of Neutrality and Humanitarian Law

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/

The law asserts that neutral countries should not allow their resources to be used by one country to attack another country.

The fundamental problem with this is the weakness of sovereign infrastructure of countries. Computers can be infiltrated without cognizance of the neutral country to launch attack. Can we hold these countries responsible for the attacks launched by other countries, or elements that they don't control?

Especially if the country does not have technical ability or resources to secure the network to protect from such activities.

Can they be responsible, or can they be held responsible? Take the case of attack on Sony, multiple countries were attributed to the attacks by different people. But the attribution was never clear. So whom can we blame for the attack?

And so neutrality can be maintained only when there is equality. Only when there is enough technical ability among the countries to be able to manage the attacks.

And enough technical ability to be able to monitor their own networks. Given that you don't have total control of cyberspace in all the countries, this whole idea of neutrality and the law of neutrality is very difficult to apply.

Third, look at the humanitarian law.

There has been a particular emphasis on application of this international humanitarian law to cyber conflict.

This law defines a set of rules that limit the effects of armed conflict while protecting individuals who are not, or are no longer participating in the hostilities and restricts the means and methods of warfare.

While one may agree that the arguments being made, once you recognize the unique difference between the sovereign and physical domain. In several instances citizens of a country are themselves involved in launching attacks. For instance, if you look at the US-Russia conflict, the citizens of Russia were launching attacks on the computers that were installed in Estonia and Georgia in two different attacks. Now, can the citizens of a country be held responsible, especially if they were instigated by non-governmental bodies? Who is responsible? Or, if the entire population of a country were responsible for an attack. So again, this is a very difficult thing to gauge.

It is also important to note that laws are subject interpretation, based on one's own point of view.

They can be applied erroneously, misused for parochial reasons, or flouted by reasons of reciprocity on flimsy grounds. The laws need to be made such that are unambiguous and enforceable.

The attackers can use the cloak of anonymity that the Internet provides to camouflage their true identities. And therein lies the difficulty in enforcing the rules. There are several explicit factors that make enforceability very hard, and one of them is ambiguity. Which is very hard to overcome.


International Humanitarian law does not strictly prohibit countries from entering a war  but declares certain actions in a war to be legal or not.