"We Need a Cyberarms Control Agreement."
We don't. Cyberwar alarmists want the United States to see cybersecurity as a new challenge on a geopolitical scale. They see cyberspace becoming a new area for military competition with rivals such as Russia and China, and they believe new cyberarms limitation agreements are needed to prevent this. There are some rumblings to establish international norms on this topic: The British government convened a conference in London in late 2011, originally intended to make the Internet more secure by agreeing on new rules of the road, and Russia and China proposed at the U.N. General Assembly last September the establishment of an "international code of conduct for information security." Now, diplomats are debating whether the United Nations should try to forge the equivalent of nuclear arms control in cyberspace.
So, should it? The answer is no. Attempts to limit cyberweapons through international agreements have three principal problems. The first difficulty is drawing the line between cybercrime and potentially political activity in cyberspace. In January, for instance, a Saudi hacker stole about 20,000 Israeli credit card numbers from a shopping website and leaked the information to the public. In retaliation, a group of Israeli hackers broke into Saudi shopping sites and threatened to release private credit card information.
Where is the dividing line? Even if it were possible to distinguish criminal from state-sponsored political activity, they often use the same means. A second hitch is practical: Verification would be impossible. Accurately counting the size of nuclear arsenals and monitoring enrichment activities is already a huge challenge; installing cameras to film programmers and "verify" they don't design malicious software is a pipe dream.
The third problem is political, and even more fundamental: Cyberaggressors may act politically, but in sharp contrast with warfare, they are likely to have a strong interest in avoiding attribution. Subversion has always thrived in cyberspace because preserving one's anonymity is easier to achieve than ironclad attribution. That's the root of the political problem: Having a few states agree on cyberarms limitation is about as realistic as a treaty to outlaw espionage and about as practical as outlawing the general subversion of established order.
Aude GENET/AFP/Getty Images



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