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Just Cyber War?: Casus Belli, Information Ethics, and the Human Perspective
Abstract
Does the advent of cyber-war require us to abandon the traditional ethical framework for thinking about the morality of warfare - just war theory - and develop principles specific to the unique nature of cyber-attacks? Or can just war theory still provide an appropriate basis for thinking through the ethical issues raised by cyber-weapons? This article explores these questions via the issue of whether a cyber-attack can constitute a casus belli. The first half of the paper critically engages with recent attempts to provide a new theory of just information warfare (JIW) that is supposedly better suited to the unique character of cyber war insofar as it is grounded the broader meta-ethical framework of information ethics (IE). Yet the paper argues that not only is JIW fundamentally unsuitable as a way of thinking about cyber-war, but (in the second half) that it is possible to develop a different account of how we can understand a cyber-attack as constituting a casus belli in a way that is in keeping with traditional just war theory. In short, there is no need to reinvent just war theory for the digital age.
The world can be divided into a digital sphere and a physical sphere. Within the realm of the physical sphere, Michael Walzer’s Just War Theory stands as a prominent framework for understanding the ethics of warfare. Is his theoretical framework also applicable to the digital sphere? This article studies whether elements of Walzer’s theory can be adapted to the context of digital conflict. Walzer divides countries into zones of peace, zones of war, and in-between zones. A country could then, for example, be a physical zone of peace but a digital zone of war. This article explores in which ways the defining characteristics of the different zones can be found in the digital sphere. It concludes that the digital sphere should mostly be seen as an in-between zone, with the problem of very unclear borders. Regarding Walzer’s theory, while it offers valuable insights when applied to the digital sphere, difficulties arise, underscoring the necessity for further research to refine the principles of just war within the digital sphere.
Emerging Military Technology: A Challenge for Military Ethics and Military Chaplains as Trainers? — The Finnish military chaplains’ work is increasingly focused on training. The renewed conscript training programmes do well in accounting for a soldier’s mind and ethics, which is why it is necessary to consider the skills of chaplains as ethical trainers. Emerging military technologies have also brought new ethical issues to the fore. In this article, we analyse how emerging military technologies challenge the soldier’s ethical action competence and what professional skills the chaplaincy need to support the soldiers. In the 2020s, the military chaplaincy are working in a pluralistic society and operational environment, where the window for taking action in pre-crisis times has shrunk, the tensions in the security environment have increased and the role of soldiers has become more international. As the ethical action competence is an integral part of the soldiers’ overall action competence in the Finnish Defence Forces, it must remain intact. Developing military technologies test the ethical decision-making capacities and moral identities of soldiers. The military chaplaincy can respond to these new challenges of technologies with pedagogical, theological and worldview-related expertise.
Suomalaisten sotilaspappien tehtävät ovat yhä enemmän suuntautuneet koulutukseen. Uudistetut varusmiesten koulutusohjelmat huomioivat vahvasti sotilaan mielen ja etiikan, minkä vuoksi on syytä tarkastella sotilaspappien osaamista etiikan kouluttajina. Uusia eettisiä kysymyksiä tuovat kehittyvät sotilasteknologiat. Artikkelissa analysoimme, miten kehittyvät sotilasteknologiat haastavat sotilaan eettistä toimintakykyä, ja pohdimme millaista ammatillista osaamista sotilaspapit tarvitsevat tukiessaan sotilaita niissä. Sotilaspapit tekevät 2020-luvulla työtään moniarvoisessa yhteiskunnassa ja toimintaympäristössä, jossa kriisien varoajat ovat lyhentyneet, turvallisuusympäristön jännitteet kasvaneet ja sotilaiden tehtävät muuttuneet aiempaa kansainvälisemmiksi. Sotilaan eettiseltä toimintakyvyltä, jota Puolustusvoimissa pidetään sotilaan kokonaisvaltaisen toimintakyvyn koossa pitävänä osana, vaaditaan siksi eheyttä. Kehittyvät sotilasteknologiat koettelevat erityisesti sotilaan eettistä päätöksentekokykyä ja moraali-identiteettiä. Pedagogisella, teologisella ja katsomuksellisella osaamisella sotilaspapit voisivat vastata teknologioiden tuomiin uusiin haasteisiin.
The article is devoted to consideration and philosophical research of problem of informative war in media space. Informative war is examined as difficult technology of social manipulation which is carried out by MASS-MEDIA. It will be that such modern informative war is the multifaceted enough and multilevel phenomenon. The informative context of russian aggression against Ukraine is analyzed and grounded his unprecedentedness on scale of opposition, informative accompaniment and by the level of produced content of different quality, value and setting. The basic methods of distribution of destabilizing information, which diffuses pessimism, fear and passivity, disappointment for those or other leaders, political guidance of the state etc. are analyzed.
This contribution discusses the growing importance of cyber attacks directed at the public sphere and the crucial role of non-state actors in cyber attacks from a perspective of just war theory. Going back to Grotius’ and Vitoria’s seminal teachings on international law, the article makes the case for distributed cyber deterrence involving private and public actors. Further, it justifies sanctions for cyber attacks that do not cause physical violence, for example the interference with elections or the hacking of companies. It considers the post-physicality of cyberspace, the attribution problem, private just war theory and national self-determination through deliberation.
Private cybersecurity firms are entrusted to ensure much cybersecurity, ranging from purely defensive operations to more controversial ones, such as active-cyber defense (ACD) and ‘hacking back’. As with the outsourcing of traditional military and security services to private military and security companies (PMSCs), the reliance on private firms raises the ethical question of to what extent the private sector should be involved in providing security services. In this article, I consider three different ethical responses to this question. I argue that a moderately restrictive approach should be adopted, which holds that private firms can justifiably launch some cybersecurity services—defensive measures—but are not permitted to perform others—offensive measures.
thics for Cyber War and Cyber Warriors
Although some claim that the term cyber war is merely metaphorical, there are good reasons to see cyber war as a form of warfare ‐ even if it is not war as we have hitherto known it. This poses the question whether the principles of the Just War Tradition, which claims to offer an alternative for pacifism and realism, apply to this specific kind of war too. This article argues that the jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality are applicable, and that actually applying them would limit the harm cyber-attacks currently cause. Most cyber-attacks of recent years wrongly target civilians, and this amounts to a serious breach of these principles. The final part of this article looks at those who actually conduct the cyber-attacks, the cyber soldiers ‐ how do they fit into the military profession, and to what extent can we expect them to uphold the principles of Just War?
This book offers an overview of the ethical problems posed by Information Warfare, and of the different approaches and methods used to solve them, in order to provide the reader with a better grasp of the ethical conundrums posed by this new form of warfare.
The volume is divided into three parts, each comprising four chapters. The first part focuses on issues pertaining to the concept of Information Warfare and the clarifications that need to be made in order to address its ethical implications. The second part collects contributions focusing on Just War Theory and its application to the case of Information Warfare. The third part adopts alternative approaches to Just War Theory for analysing the ethical implications of this phenomenon. Finally, an afterword by Neelie Kroes - Vice President of the European Commission and European Digital Agenda Commissioner - concludes the volume. Her contribution describes the interests and commitments of the European Digital Agenda with respect to research for the development and deployment of robots in various circumstances, including warfare.
Cyberwar has been described as a revolution in military affairs, a transformation of technology and doctrine capable of overturning the prevailing world order. This characterization of the threat from cyberwar, however, reflects a common tendency to conflate means and ends; studying what could happen in cyberspace (or anywhere else) makes little sense without considering how conflict over the internet is going to realize objectives commonly addressed by terrestrial warfare. To supplant established modes of conflict, cyberwar must be capable of furthering the political ends to which force or threats of force are commonly applied, something that in major respects cyberwar fails to do. As such, conflict over the internet is much more likely to serve as an adjunct to, rather than a substitute for, existing modes of terrestrial force. Indeed, rather than threatening existing political hierarchies, cyberwar is much more likely to simply augment the advantages of status quo powers.
My aim in this paper is to reflect on a very narrow question: under what conditions might a cyber-attack provide a just cause for war? I begin by articulating what makes for a just cause, briefly address the problem of attribution, and then discuss three broad categories of cyber-attack: those that clearly do not satisfy the just cause requirement, those that clearly do satisfy the just cause requirement, and three ambiguous cases – the destruction of property, the emplacement of logic bombs, and the failure to prevent cyber-attacks. My conclusions are exploratory and suggestive rather than definitive, partly by virtue of the extreme paucity of literature on the moral assessment of cyberwar.
The paper addresses several issues in the morality of cyberwar and cyberwarfare, defined as one nation's attacks on the governmental or civilian information systems of another nation. It sketches the diverse technical ways in which an attack may occur, including denial-of-service attacks and the insertion of various forms of malware. It argues that existing international law and widely discussed principles of Just War Theory do not straightforwardly apply to cyberwarfare, and many forms of cyberwarfare differ from previous forms of warfare in neither injuring nor killing human beings, nor causing lasting physical damage - but can nevertheless cause serious harm to a nation's vital interests. Another dissimilarity with traditional warfare is in the degree of knowledge of the identity of an attacker (the 'attribution problem'). The paper argues that cyberwarfare is not amenable to regulation by international pacts and that we can expect long periods of low-level, multilateral cyberwarfare, a Cyber Cold War, as a game-theoretic equilibrium is sought,. The paper laments the lack of a cyberwarfare policy, and concludes that it is only by applying game-theoretic principles that strategies can be discovered that are both moral and effective in suppressing overall harm to all parties in the long run.
This is the first philosophical monograph entirely and exclusively dedicated to Information Ethics.Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have profoundly changed many aspects of life, including the nature of entertainment, work, communication, education, health care, industrial production and business, social relations, and conflicts.Therefore, they have had a radical and widespread impact on our moral lives and on contemporary ethical debates. Privacy, ownership, freedom of speech, responsibility, technological determinism, the digital divide, online pornography, are only some of the pressing issues that characterize the ethical discourse in the information society. They are the subject of Information Ethics (IE), the new philosophical area of research that investigates the ethical impact of ICTs on human life and society.The book lays down, for the first time, the conceptual foundations for Information Ethics. It does so systematically, by pursuing three goals:a). metatheoretical goal: it describes what Information Ethics is, its problems, approaches, and methods;b). introductory goal: it helps the reader to gain a better grasp of the complex and multifarious nature of the various concepts and phenomena related to Information Ethics;c) analytic goal: it answers several key theoretical questions of great philosophical interest, arising from the investigation of the ethical implications of ICTs.Although entirely independent of The Philosophy of Information (OUP, 2011), the previous book by the same author, it complements it as part of the tetralogy on the foundations of the philosophy of information (Principia Philosophiae Informationis).
This article is devoted to developing an ethical analysis of information warfare, the warfare waged in the cyber domain. It has the twofold goal of filling the theoretical vacuum surrounding this phenomenon and of providing the grounding for the definition of new ethical regulations for information warfare. The article maintains that Just War Theory is a necessary but not sufficient instrument for considering the ethical implications of information warfare and argues that a suitable ethical analysis of this kind of warfare is developed when Just War theory is merged with Information Ethics. The initial part of the article describes information warfare and its main features, and highlights the problems that arise when Just War Theory is endorsed as a means of addressing ethical problems engendered by information warfare. The final part introduces the main aspects of Information Ethics and defines three principles for a just information warfare.
This paper examines the morality of cyber weapons, offering conditions under which they are not only ethical under just war theory, but morally preferred over their kinetic counterparts. When these conditions are satisfied, states not only have the option of using cyber weapons, but could even acquire a moral duty to do so over other forms of warfare. In particular, we show that states are morally obliged to use cyber weapons instead of kinetic weapons when they can be deployed for a purpose already deemed just under the law of armed conflict and without any significant loss of capability. The reason behind this moral obligation is that cyber weapons can reduce both the risk to one’s own (putatively just) military and the harm to one’s adversary and non-combatants. The paper discusses this obligation, using examples to illustrate cases where it does or does not apply. It also addresses several objections that have been raised about the use of cyber weapons, showing that they fail to fully counter the obligation to use cyber weapons derived from their reduction of risk and harm properties.
Cyber warfare has changed the scenario of war from an empirical and a theoretical viewpoint. Cyber war is no longer based on physical violence only, but on military, political, economic and ideological strategies meant to exploit a state’s informational resources. This means that a deeper understanding of what cyber war is requires us to adopt an informational approach. This approach may enable us to account for the two-dimensional nature of cyber war (destruction and exploitation), to revise the notion of violence on which war is premised and to understand to what extent the traditional ideas of ‘just war’ may apply to the scenario of cyber warfare. This point is crucial, since it concerns whether a cyber war is meant to restore a broken international political and legal order or to participate in its construction.
This special issue gathers together a selection of papers presented by international experts during a workshop entitled ‘Ethics of Cyber-Conflicts’, which was devoted to fostering interdisciplinary debate on the ethical and legal problems and the regulatory gap concerning cyber conflicts. The workshop was held in 2013 at the Centro Alti Studi Difesa in Rome under the auspices of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (NATO CCD COE). This NATO-accredited international military organisation that has always placed a high value on an interdisciplinary approach to cyber defence, uniting as it does perspectives from technical, policy, legal, and strategic domains. The Centre’s mission is to enhance capability, cooperation, and information-sharing between NATO, its member states, and partner countries in the area of cyber defence by virtue of research, education, and consultation. The workshop was one of the projects supported by the Centre to achieve this mission.Readers may ...
We provide an underlying theory of argument by disanalogy, in order to employ it to show that cyberwarfare is fundamentally new (relative to traditional kinetic warfare, and espionage). Once this general case is made, the battle is won: we are well on our way to establishing our main thesis: that Just War Theory itself must be modernized. Augustine and Aquinas (and their predecessors) had a stunningly long run, but today’s world, based as it is on digital information and increasingly intelligent information-processing, points the way to a beast so big and so radically different, that the core of this duo’s insights needs to be radically extended.
This article argues that the traditional jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria are fully capable of providing the ethical guidance needed to legitimately conduct military cyber operations. The first part examines the criteria’s foundations by focusing on the notion of liability to defensive harm worked out by revisionist just war thinkers. The second part critiques the necessity of alternative frameworks, which its proponents assert are required to at least supplement the traditional just war criteria. Using the latter, the third part evaluates ethical issues germane to responding to cyber force, including casus belli, moral aspects of “the attribution problem,” and respective rights and duties when attacks involve innocent third-party states. The fourth part addresses in bello issues, including compliance with discrimination, necessity, and civilian due care imperatives; whether civilians may be targeted with sub-“use of force” cyber-attacks and the permissibility of using civilian contractors to conduct cyber-attacks. Throughout these analyses, conclusions are brought into conversation with those of The Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare.
Stuxnet, the computer worm which disrupted Iranian nuclear enrichment in 2010, is the first instance of a computer network attack known to cause physical damage across international boundaries. Some have described Stuxnet as the harbinger of a new form of warfare that threatens even the strongest military powers. The influential but largely untested Cyber Revolution thesis holds that the internet gives militarily weaker actors asymmetric advantages, that offense is becoming easier while defense is growing harder, and that the attacker's anonymity undermines deterrence. However, the empirical facts of Stuxnet support an opposite interpretation; cyber capabilities can marginally enhance the power of stronger over weaker actors, the complexity of weaponization makes cyber offense less easy and defense more feasible than generally appreciated, and cyber options are most attractive when deterrence is intact. Stuxnet suggests that considerable social and technical uncertainties associated with cyber operations may significantly blunt their revolutionary potential.
Evaluations of cyber war and weapons range from denunciations of their widespread and indiscriminate destructiveness and deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, all the way to appraisals of cyber warfare as a morally preferable, less destructive alternative to conventional warfare. To achieve greater clarity, I distinguish permissible from impermissible forms of cyber conflict, as well as genuine cyber "warfare" from large scale criminal enterprises (including commercial and state-sponsored espionage) in the cyber realm. I criticize the lack of discrimination often encountered in the formulation of cyber strategy and development of cyber weapons, and argue in favor of international governance and guidance with reference to key just war principles of proportionality, discrimination, and last resort. This results in restricting the use of cyber weapons to justified military targets, with Stuxnet as a positive case study. In morality, we infer or derive operable constraints on, and guidelines for, acceptable practice by examining instances of what all agree is either good or bad practice. Likewise, in international law, we recognize the evolution of customary law through the accepted conduct of otherwise law-abiding states. On these grounds, and with reference to recent cases of cyber war, I argue that an act of cyber warfare is permissible if it aims primarily at harming military (rather than civilian) infrastructure, degrades an adversary"s ability to undertake highly destructive offensive kinetic operations, harms no civilians and/or destroys little or no civilian infrastructure in the process, and is undertaken as a "last resort" in the sense that all reasonable alternatives short of attack have been attempted to no avail, and further delay would only make the situation worse.
What are cyber-weapons? Instruments of code-borne attack span a wide spectrum, from generic but low-potential tools to specific but high-potential weaponry. This distinction brings into relief a two-pronged hypothesis that stands in stark contrast to some of the received wisdom on cyber-security. Maximising the destructive potential of a cyber-weapon is likely to come with a double effect: it will significantly increase the resources, intelligence and time required for development and deployment – and more destructive potential is likely to decrease the number of targets, the risk of collateral damage and the political utility of cyber-weapons.
This article, an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Military Ethics devoted to emerging military technologies, elaborates the present status of certain predictions about the future of warfare and combat made by postmodern essayist, Umberto Eco, during the First Gulf War in 1991. The development of military robotics, innovations in nanotechnology, prospects for the biological, psychological, and neurological 'enhancement' of combatants themselves, combined with the increasing use of nonlethal weapons and the advent of cyber warfare, have operationalized the diffuse, decentralized, 'neoconnectionist' vision of warfare in the post-Clausewitzian, postmodern world that Eco first prophesied. On the one hand, such technologies threaten to make war ever more ubiquitous as the path of least resistance, rather than the option of last resort, for the resolution of political conflict. On the other hand, these same technologies offer prospects for lessening the indiscriminate destructive power of war, and enhance prospects for the evolution from state-centered conventional war, to discriminate law enforcement undertaken by international coalitions of peacekeeping forces.
While most normative evaluations of military cyber-operations have emerged from the legal community, this article assesses the legitimacy of such operations from a philosophical-ethical perspective. After reviewing the relationship between rights forfeiture and the jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria of the just war tradition, it applies these criteria to several aspects of cyber-operations, including responses to cyber-activities, the use of cyber-capabilities affecting combatants and civilians, and the use of these capabilities by contractors. Finally, it briefly addresses the legitimacy of limiting rights to privacy and anonymity in service of preventing cyber-harm.
Cyber-weapons are software and software, at least intuitively, is non-physical. Several authors have noted that this potentially renders problematic the application of normative frameworks like UN Charter Article 2(4) to cyber-weapons. If Article 2(4) only proscribes the use of physical force, and if cyber-weapons are non-physical, then cyber-weapons fall outside the purview of Article 2(4). This article explores the physicality of software, examining Stuxnet in particular. First, I show that with a few relatively uncontroversial metaphysical claims we can secure the conclusion that Stuxnet is physical. In particular, there exist instances of Stuxnet that are both located in space and causally efficacious, and this is very strong evidence for their being physical. Second, I argue that the question of physicality is actually irrelevant for the moral evaluation of an attack like Stuxnet because of its undeniably physical effects. Finally, I argue that some features of Stuxnet should make us optimistic about the prospects for discrimination and proportionality in cyberwarfare.
For many years after its introduction in the early 1990s, the cyberwar concept - which outlined a new mode of conflict that would emphasize disruption of information systems and flows - was given little credence. Over the past several years, however, cyberwars of both irregular and somewhat more conventional types have erupted (e.g., see respectively Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008). Global awareness of cyberwar has risen sharply, and many nation-states are preparing their defenses, as well as their capabilities for mounting offensive operations. The American military's declaration in 2011 that cyberspace is a 'warfighting domain' highlights a need to explore the ethical implications and nuances of cyberwar. This article finds that classic jus ad bellum constructs come under great pressure from cyberwar, while jus in bello concerns may prove more manageable. Another key theme is that disproportionate attention is given to the notion of employing cyberwar 'strategically' (i.e., to strike directly at other nations' infrastructures), where its use is less likely to achieve 'victory' and is more problematic ethically. Instead, a focus on the application of cyberwar techniques in battle may lead to shorter, less bloody, 'more ethical' conflicts.
In this essay, I reject the suggestion that the just war tradition (JWT) does not apply to cyberwarfare (CW). That is not to say CW will not include grey areas defying easy analysis in terms of the JWT. But analogously ambiguous cases have long existed in warfare without undercutting the JWT's broad relevance. That some aspects of CW are unique is likewise no threat to the JWT's applicability. The special character of CW remains similar enough to other kinds of warfare; the distinctions are more differences of degree than of kind.
For almost two decades, experts and defense establishments the world over have been predicting that cyber war is coming. But is it? This article argues in three steps that cyber war has never happened in the past, that cyber war does not take place in the present, and that it is unlikely that cyber war will occur in the future. It first outlines what would constitute cyber war: a potentially lethal, instrumental, and political act of force conducted through malicious code. The second part shows what cyber war is not, case-by-case. Not one single cyber offense on record constitutes an act of war on its own. The final part offers a more nuanced terminology to come to terms with cyber attacks. All politically motivated cyber attacks are merely sophisticated versions of three activities that are as old as warfare itself: sabotage, espionage, and subversion.
See also Lucas, Ethics and Cyber Warfare
- Schmitt