"U.S. and Russia Differ on a Treaty for Cyberspace"

Source: JOHN MARKOFF and ANDREW E. KRAMER, The New York Times, June 27, 2009.

The Department of Defense is fielding 50.000 attacks on its information systems a day. It is creating a cybersecurity command to improve our defenses against cyber attack.

)A)fter a Navy P-3 surveillance plane collided with a Chinese fighter plane......(there was) a huge increase in attacks on United States government computer targets from sources that could not be identified,

There were computer attacks in Estonia in April 2007 and in the nation of Georgia last August.

Both Russia and the United States agree something should be done about the situation, but they disagree on what that is.

Russia favors an international treaty along the lines of those negotiated for chemical weapons and has pushed for that approach at a series of meetings this year and in public statements by a high-ranking official.

The United States argues that a treaty is unnecessary. It instead advocates improved cooperation among international law enforcement groups. If these groups cooperate to make cyberspace more secure against criminal intrusions, their work will also make cyberspace more secure against military campaigns, American officials say.

The article does say that the United States is a signatory to "the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, which took effect in 2004."

American officials are particularly resistant to agreements that would allow governments to censor the Internet, saying they would provide cover for totalitarian regimes.

Comment: This seems very complicated. I suppose all countries oppose cybercrime including criminal attacks via the Internet on computers.

However, if two countries choose to go to war it seems obvious that they will attack each others information infrastructures. I suspect that neither Russia nor the United States would want to deprive themselves of the ability to make some limited attacks. Disrupting an enemies battleground communications seems a prototypical power that military leaders would be unwilling to give up. On the other hand, who would approve of disrupting the information infrastructure in homeland children's hospitals?

There is a long history of national governments empowering privateers to attack enemy property and in capitalist countries, cyberwarfare would be likely to depend on contracted services from the private sector. Even if one were to find a way to ban the use of privateers to carry out cyberattacks, how would one enforce a treaty that required a government to track down and prosecute individual "patriots" who conducted cyberattacks on an enemy state.

It will be interesting to see how this works out.