Political and Legal Influences of Cyber Wars - Essay Example

POLITICAL AND LEGAL INFLUENCES OF CYBER WARS Political and Legal Influences of Cyber Wars The internet and world wide website connection has been hailed as a new and powerful engine of social and economic change the world over. However, there has been inadequate research and sensitization on the forces behind internet usage. This is attributed to the fact that there have been a rising number of cyber wars and hacking and all this is due to the fact that there is worldwide connection with the advent of computers and technology , more so the internet. Earlier, hacking mostly used to occur at institutional levels where for instance the main unit could be logged into and classified information accessed by unauthorized people. Nowadays, however, this has spread to the national level with countries having serious cases of hacking. It is believed that this is fuelled by a number of political and legal influences and this will be the focus of discussion in this paper. Since the 20th century, people have understood war to be a conflict that involves kinetic weapons such as bullets, missiles, machine guns, aircraft carriers, fighter jets and sometimes ships and submarines. However, the coming of the 21st century brought in the use of internet based technologies in fights. This is a form of cold war since there are no physical fights but people are combating anyway. Cyber wars can occur within or without to country and are mostly fuelled by several factors among them political and legal influences. For example, on June 1, 2012, David Sanger of the New York Times reported that the United States together with Israel had developed the Stuxnet computer worm that was used to attack Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities. This is mostly due to political reasons (Fidler, 2013). Most specifically, the United States and Iran have been enemy states for quite some time due to Iran’s links with terrorist activities and this may have been the most probable reason for the attack. When the computer worm was discovered in 2010, experts considered Stuxnet a cyber weapon due to its complexity, the reason why it was created and the way it worked. It exploited several vulnerabilities in the Windows software and targeted industrial control systems in Iran. This is the extent to which countries target each other using technology as a result of political feuds (Fidler, 2013). Just like the Stuxnet, the Flame Virus that operated as an espionage tools because it added and removed some information from computers was discovered. This was found in computers mostly in the Middle East with again Iran being the most affected. This led to the speculation that again it might have been the United States that propagated this virus. Other sources argued that the source of the virus might have been Israel too. Such a virus can be used in a legal context in that information such as witnesses reports can be altered thereby affecting the whole legal process (Fidler, 2013). This is the extent to which legal issues fuel cyber wars. Another way in which a legal issue can bring about cyber warfare would be in the case of institutions. For example, a foreign government may attack the website of a university because one of the faculty members of the university has been an outspoken opponent in the attacking government’s treatment of a minority group (Brenner & Clarke, 2010). In another way, an attacker could target a civilian that is deemed as an exploiter of the country’s resources. All these are ways in which legal issues could lead to the rise of cyber warfare. Cyber war could also occur when an electric utility could be targeted to affect a power grid that supplies a telecommunications company that is being used to attack the attacker. This is due to political reasons. Two rivaling companies may do this when they are competing in terms of power production (Brenner &Clarke, 2010). According to Finklea and Theohary, 2013, one serious case where politics fuelled the use of the internet during a conventional armed conflict occurred in 2008 in the Georgian province of South Ossetia. Georgia triggered the conflict by attacking Russian soldiers who were part of a peacekeeping contingent in South Ossetia under the terms of a Georgia-Russian treaty of 1991. In the night of 7th August, Georgia attacked, killing about a dozen Russian soldiers and wounded many others. Russia staged a counter attack to this. Georgia claimed that Russia initiated attacks against a number of Georgian websites including government sites, media sites and commercial sites. The computer attacks lasted nearly a month while the physical fight lasted about a week. Russia would have had the opportunity to defend themselves from the direct attacks by the Georgian forces but they chose not to. This was also a legal issue due to the fact that Georgia’s attacks clearly indicated that an end of its consent to the 1991 treaty that they had made with Russia. Even though Russia may have decided to remain calm and let the treaty be terminated in a legal way although prematurely, they decided to engage in cyber warfare (Finklea & Theohary, 2013). Cyber war in a way falls into the broader category of cyber crime since it sometimes involves the attack of systems of a certain incorporation. As such, many countries are trying to come up with ways with which to reduce the instances of cyber war. This is due to the fact that cyber war is thought of more as a national security threat than a public security threat. This is the reason why most countries are coming up with strategies that are focused on countering national security threats such as cyber wars. Webster, 2013, says that the United States has had a sort of war with China that most of the time transverses to the internet. China has been accused of using cyber war to get access to the policies that are being developed by politicians in the United States so as to develop their country. The United States has always accused China of trying to get into their systems so as to know of the progress plans that the States has. According to Aljazeera, ‘the Chinese look at Washington, and they think there must be some document somewhere, some flowchart saved on a computer in the basement of some think-tank, that lays it all out.’ Struggle for superiority between the two superpowers may be the reason why China and the United States have had cyber war from time to time. Apart from the United States, China has also had politically driven cyber wars with Indonesia. In 1998, there was an organized attack by around 3000 Chinese hackers staged on government sites to protest anti-Chinese riots in the country. After that, there were many attempts to hack into major computer networks that belonged to defence ministers, banks, and the media of Indonesia to revenge on this issue that is politically driven (O’Connell, 2013). Robinson and Crenshaw, 2003 assert that even though a combination of telecommunications and computer technologies has resulted in the creation of the internet, a global network of computers that has been growing at an exponential rate has led to some adverse effects. Increasing rivalry in political issues within and without countries has been one of the issues spreading the use of the internet for communication and at the same time fuelling the advent of cyber war. Cyber war took a toll on the social media in a recent case between two countries in Africa Kenya and Nigeria. The Kenyan football team Harambee stars had a football tournament in Nigeria and upon arrival in the country they did not receive proper treatment in terms of accommodation and provision of training grounds as should be the case. As a result people from the two countries engaged in an exchange of words for almost a whole via through the social media facebook and twitter. Even though this is not much of a legal issue, it simply shows the extent to which countries nowadays engage in cyber war. Discussions over cyber wars have escalated to the extent that there is legislation regarding these wars. Due to the fact that it is less costly to mount normal physical attacks as compared to cyber attacks and the fact that many industrialized countries are dependent upon computer networks, they are more prone to cyber attacks. As such, an expansive reading of Article 2 (4) of the American constitution prohibits coercive activities such as cyber wars (Hathawaya et al., 2012). In the same case Carr, 2007 points out the fact that can states legally employ third parties to conduct cyber operations in self- defence of the state. It is important to have a clear understanding of the legal regime and norms that govern a nation’s use of force to launch a counter attack. This is the extent to which it is difficult to protect a nation from cyber attacks. In most instances, there are no clear definitions on what is to be done in case it happens to an adverse extent. Andress and Winterfeld, 2011, argue out that if cyber attacks can be made a very costly affair or the consequences extremely painful, then nobody would use it and that would reduce the instances of cyber war. In conclusion, Cyber war has been an issue in most nations since the advent of internet technology. Legal and political issues have been some of the issues considered to fuel cyber war. Many countries have been trying to come up with ways of curbing the instances of cyber war and this is an issue that many nations are still grappling with. As such, there is still much that needs to be done to ensure that nations in the world are free from attacks such as cyber warfare. References Andress, J. & Winterfeld, S. (2011), Cyber Warfare: Techniques, Tactics and Tools for Security Practitioners. Belmont: Elsevier. Brenner, S. W. & Clarke, L. L. (2010), Civilians in Cyber warfare: Casualties. Retrieved on 9th April 2013 from https://www.law.upenn.edu/institutes/cerl/conferences/cyberwar/papers/reading/Brenner Clarke.pdf Carr, J. (2011), Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld. New York: O’Reilly Media, Inc. Fidler, J. (2013), Recent Developments and Revelations Concerning Cyber security and Cyberspace: Implications for International Law. Retrieved on 9th April, 2013 from http://www.asil.org/insights120620.cfm Finklea, K. M. & Theohary, C. A. (2013), Cybercrime: Conceptual Issues for Congress and U.S. Law Enforcement. Retrieved on 9th April, 2013 from http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42547.pdf Hathawaya et al. (2012), The Law of Cyber Attack. Retrieved on 10th April, 2013 from http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/cglc/LawOfCyberAttack.pdf O’Connell, M. E. (2013), Cyber Security without Cyber War. Journal of Conflict and Security War, Volume 17, Issue 2. Robinson, K. K. & Crenshaw, E. M. (2003), Erratum to “Post-industrial and cyber-space: a cross-national analysis of Internet development. Social Science Research, Volume 32, Issue 3, pp.519-524 Webster, G. (2013), Chinese cyber war and the US ‘myth of scheming’ Retrieved on 10th April, 2013 from http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/03/2013356858895780.html Read More