OT: [W'post.com] ('via' ACM): Dismantling of Saudi-CIA Web Site Illustrates Need for Clearer Cyberwar Policies

[Ed]

um, If the enemy thinks their own IT guy crashed the site, then it was
a covert operation (or a bug). If the site goes down and the redirect
goes to a .mill domain, then it is a traditional military activity (or
a bug). In love and war, almost everything can (now) be attributed to
a bug....

and stop asking the lawyers about technical things - if you lawyer up
the world, it will stop spinning(RTFM).

:)  Ed

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 1:15 PM, Mike Schwartz <schwartz at acm.org> wrote:
> This W
> ashington Post
>  article:
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/18/AR2010031805464.html
> was summarized in (and linked to, from)
>  ACM's TechNews:
> http://technews.acm.org/archives.cfm?fo=2010-03-mar/mar-19-2010.html#455307
> The
> summary says:
> Dismantling of Saudi-CIA Web Site Illustrates Need for Clearer Cyberwar
> Policies
> Washington Post (03/19/10) P. A1; Nakashima, Ellen; Priest, Dana; DeYoung,
> Karen
>
> The dissolution of an intelligence-gathering Web site set up by the Saudi
> government and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), based on
> suspicions that it was being used by extremists planning attacks on U.S.
> forces in Iraq, highlights the need for more transparent cyberwar policies.
> The use of computers to collect intelligence or to disrupt the enemy raises
> a number of issues, including under what circumstances a cyberattack outside
> the theater of war is permissible and whether dismantling an extremist Web
> site represents a covert operation or a traditional military activity.
> Current and former officials say that lawyers at the U.S. Justice
> Department's Office of Legal Counsel are engaged in a struggle to define the
> legal rules governing cyberwarfare. A key dilemma of cyberwarfare is that an
> attacker can never be sure that only the intended target will be impacted by
> an attack. A former official notes than more than 300 servers in Saudi
> Arabia, Germany, and Texas were unintentionally disrupted when the Saudi-CIA
> site was dismantled.
> View Full Article - May Require Free Registration | Return to Headlines
> and here are some juicy quotes [IMHO] from the original
> W
> ash. Post article:
>> The Saudi-CIA Web site was set up several years ago as a "honey pot,"
>> [...]
>> [...] some experts counter that dismantling Web sites is ineffective -- no
>> sooner does a site come down than a mirror site pops up somewhere
>> else. [...]
>> "It seems difficult to understand," he [Evan F. Kohlmann] [a terrorism
>> researcher] added, "why governments would interrupt  [...] a lucrative
>> intelligence-gathering tool."
> ("forwarded" by:)
> --
> Mike Schwartz
> Glendale  AZ
> schwartz at acm.org
>
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