Cyber War and International Law: Does the International Legal Process Constitute a Threat to U.S. Vital Interests?

As the concluding speaker at the conference on “Cyber War and Inter-national Law,” co-sponsored by the Naval War College and the United States Cyber Command, Yoram Dinstein, Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University, professed some disappointment that there had not been a more extensive and sharper focus at the conference on “war.”1 But perhaps the limited amount of discussion of cyber “war” at the conference was a result of the reality that the international law issues arising from the possibility of war or armed conflict through cyber means have not been the primary concern of States and scholars faced with the challenges of the cyber threat. Rather, at least in the United Nations General Assembly and other international fora, such as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the threat posed by such adversaries of the United States as the Rus-sian Federation and China seems to be an effort to adopt a global treaty that would arguably allow increased regulation by the United Nations—and perhaps the ITU—that would endanger the free flow of information on the Internet and such basic values as privacy and freedom of speech. To be sure, a hostile takeover of the Internet could have serious implications for U.S. vulnerability to cyber attack and thereby amount to a serious threat to its national security, but this is a far cry from possible revisions of the jus ad bellum and jus in bello associated with cyber war, which is to the disadvantage of the United States.