Rules of Cyber War

"The Washington Post" this morning published an interesting report about the U.S. dismantling a Saudi Arabian website that anti-U.S. forces might have been using to coordinate attacks in Iraq. The article raises questions about the adequacy of U.S. policies governing cyber war.

When George W. Bush was president, intelligence officials apparently were forced "to refine doctrine as it executed operations," the article says. "Cyber was moving so fast that we were always in danger of building up precedent before we built up policy," former CIA Director Michael Hayden told the paper.

One question raised by the story deserves additional discussion: When is a cyber attack outside the theater of war allowed? Some military strategists would argue that the theater of war has no boundaries in cyberspace. "Every networked computer is on the front line," the U.S. Joint Forces Command said in a report released this week. In other words, if the U.S. is at war and its adversaries are using cyberspace, then all of cyberspace is a war zone.

Another puzzling aspect of the story: If the troublesome website was established by the CIA and Saudi government to gather intelligence on jihadists, why did it take a team of NSA experts to dismantle the site, with resulting collateral damage to other parts of the Internet? -- TL