MARK COLVIN: One reason the First World War got so bogged down over four years was that generals used to 19th century warfare took so long to understand the new technologies of air and tank warfare.
Australia's general John Monash was among the first to realise the need to co-ordinate all the forces - the move that brought on the great advances of 1918.
Are today's military leaders similarly unprepared for the need to bring cyber warfare into the mix?
Peter W Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is lecturing on cyber security and cyber war at Sydney University tonight.
We began by talking about definition of cyber warfare, and I asked him first if the 2007 internet attack which brought Estonia to an electronic standstill could have been seen as an act of war.
PETER SINGER: Yes but that's not war. Count me as a traditionalist, even though we're talking about cyber, is that there still has to be some kind of violence, some kind of physical effect, so the so-called cyber war that hit Estonia several years ago, essentially a couple of their public facing websites on government institutions got defaced, it would be a lot like someone running up to the parliament and spray painting the side of it.
And then some of the traffic was blocked, it would be like someone standing there in the road blocking it for a couple of hours. If these were physical things, if it was people doing the spray painting, or standing in the road, you wouldn't describe that as war.
MARK COLVIN: You could use another analogy, you could say that one country bombs another one’s power station, kills nobody, that's defiantly an act of warfare and it makes just as much difference, just as much damaged doesn't it?
PETER SINGER: Exactly. But fortunately we've not had that happen yet. We've not had someone carry out this kind of attack that knocks power grids offline or disrupts traffic in a way that people die or the like. We haven't had…
MARK COLVIN: But if they did by cyber means, that would be an act of warfare, just as bombing a power station would?
PETER SINGER: Exactly, I don't think a prime minister or a president will care whether the means was with software or hardware. They'll judge it by the ends; they'll judge it by the final effect.
If someone lit a forest fire, even though, and hundreds of people were killed, even though they used a match rather than killing with a knife or a gun, no one would say well, that wasn't a bad deed.
So at the end of the day I think we'll judge a lot of the effects of cyber war in traditional manners.
Now the key here cyber war in all its likelihood is probably going to be involving both traditional, physical operations and computer operations. And a good illustration of this is what we've seen Israel do a couple of years ago, for example, where they use cyber means to turn Syrian air defences off and then flew jets overhead which dropped real bombs. It was the cyber and the traditional working together, that's probably the future of both war and cyber war.
MARK COLVIN: But in traditional warfare there are the Geneva conventions and a bunch of other rules, at the moment there are no rules in cyber warfare, am I right?
PETER SINGER: We have this debate as to whether the old rules should apply and if they're sufficient and then if not what can we do about them. Now we get into a problem of can we then walk the talk? So as an illustration, NATO put together a group of international legal experts and said 'you know what - we should write a manual about the laws of cyber war'.
And they wrote this manual, it's a very good document, except then the US government looked at the manual and said, 'you know what, great manual, but we're not going to say that that definitively applies to us, we want to keep all our options.' That's just within NATO…
MARK COLVIN: It took the UN to create the Geneva Conventions, is there any prospect that the UN could do anything about this?
PETER SINGER: Well it took the UN, but remember it also took the horrors of World War Two, that's unfortunately the long history of international law - in fact the foundation of international law itself, going back to the 1600s. Usually we wait for the bad thing to happen and then we collectively build up a rule based structure to try to prevent it from happening again.
Hopefully we won't repeat that pattern with cyber, but I'm not going to bet my house on it.
MARK COLVIN: Well the obvious question from that is what is the nightmare scenario?
PETER SINGER: I think to me the nightmare scenario is not the clear cut use of this in a war, it's actually the fuzzy space in between, before you get to formally declared wars, where one side may carry out a cyber attack and think it's not an act of war and the other side will interpret it as an act of war.
This fuzziness also affects the who, so not just what you're doing but the who. A number of nations, particularly the Russias and Chinas of the world, have been using cut-out groups, criminal groups, people's militia, basically to conduct attacks but say 'well that was not us, that someone else.'
And in many ways we're back to a parallel of the 1600 and 1700s where you had navies who were clearly official representatives of the King, you had pirates who were clearly criminals. And then you had this thing in the middle called privateers, they would kind of go back and forth between the legal and the illegal.
We have the cyber equivalent of that right now in a lot of different places. And that's disturbing, that's where bad things might come, from miscalculation.
MARK COLVIN: Has the United States lost moral high ground because of the Snowden revelations? I mean it's all very well to talk about China and Russia, but somebody will always now snap back with, 'well look at what the NSA did'.
PETER SINGER: It's very clear that the Snowden scandal – revelations – however you want to frame it, have been a hammer blow to Americans’ standing, both in terms of our bilateral relationships, when we're pressing china on something they point their finger back at us, right now, even if it's on things justified or not, to the discourse over internet freedom has clearly been harmed by this, to frankly American technology companies themselves are very angry at the NSA because it's costs them business.
And so this is why it's had a long-term affect well beyond just the immediate sort of revelations of what they're doing.
The question is how do we move past it, how do we power through it? We'll see some reforms, it's already happening within our legislature and then other parts of it frankly, and this also applies to our Australian partners, there's things that aren't going to change and it's just the new context of a post-Snowden world.
MARK COLVIN: Peter Singer of the New America Foundation. There will be a longer version of that interview on our website from this evening. And he's giving a lecture this evening at the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney
No comments:
Post a Comment