Norms for Thee but not for Me
But we have norms or we don’t. They’re only norms if they apply to everyone, equally, all the time.
Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 the ruminations and missives of “cyberwar” experts hit the web. The “there will not be cyberwar” and “there will be cyberwar” camps took their shots, and then everyone settled in to see how things fell out. It was happening, it wasn’t happening, who knows?
Then an intersting thing happened. The Ukrainian Prime Minister called for volunteers to man their keyboard and take the fight to Russian IPs. A little cottage industry of people who were screaming “norms” a month earlier now contorting their reasoning in order to justify slinging bytes - as long as you were slinging them at Russia.
More recently we have “8 rules for ‘civilian hackers’” which is basically a copy-paste job of the law of war and a find-replace job of “soldiers” with “hackers.” It was posted where the assumption is that it is not a parody, but its hard to tell with zingers like:
"It goes without saying that civilian hackers must respect the law of the countries they operate in.”
In a piece where you give advice about how to wage cyberwar, if that’s not someone doing a bit I don’t know what is.
It has been over two decades since people have started seriously thinking, talking, and writing about how the evolution of warfare was going to replace bullets with packets. That’s about the time it took for us to go from proto-tanks to the Panzer III. It took a lot less time for us to go from the Wright Flyer to someone dropping grenades from biplanes. In four years we went from no nuclear weapons to having (and using) two of them. I get it, its frustrating given that just about everything else associated with cyberspace is instantaneous and we can’t have the the glorous battle of the bastion hosts we’ve always dreamed of.
But we have norms or we don’t. Like the wo/man says: war isn’t an exception. They’re only norms if they apply to everyone, equally, all the time. If they don’t, then its hard to take to take such chatter seriously. And given the state of the world today, we don’t really have time to waste on the unserious.
