Cyber Attacks as "Force" under UN Charter Article 2(4)
I a 2010 article in Foreign Affairs, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn revealed that in 2008 the Department of Defense suffered “the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever” when a flash drive inserted into a US military laptop surreptitiously introduced malicious software into US Central Command’s classified and unclassified computer systems.1 Lynn explains that the US government is developing defensive systems to protect military and civilian electronic infrastructure from intrusions and, potentially worse, disruptions and destruction, and it is developing its own cyber-strategy “to defend the United States in the digital age.”2 To what extent is existing international law, including the UN Charter, adequate to regulate cyber attacks and related offensive and defensive activities today and in the future? By “cyber attacks” I mean efforts to alter, disrupt, degrade or destroy computer systems or networks or the information or programs on them.3 This article examines one slice of that legal puzzle: the UN Charter’s prohibitions of the threat or use of “force” contained in Article 2(4).4 Other writings in this volume deal with questions such as Article 51’s self-defense provisions and questions of State responsibility, and there are other international legal prohibitions and regulations that are relevant as well. But Article 2(4) is a good place to start
Computer Network Attack and the Use of Force in International Law: Thoughts on a Normative Framework
This Chapter explores the acceptability under the jus ad bellum, that body of international law governing the resort to force as an instrument of national policy, of computer network attack. Analysis centers on the United Nations Charter’s prohibition of the use of force in Article 2(4), its Chapter VII security scheme, and the inherent right to self-defense codified in Article 51. Concluding that traditional applications of the use of force prohibition fail to adequately safeguard shared community values threatened by CNA, the Chapter proposes an alternative normative framework based on scrutiny of the consequences caused by such operations.
The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory
Gerard Delanty provides a comprehensive assessment of the idea of cosmopolitanism in social and political thought which links cosmopolitan theory with critical social theory. He argues that cosmopolitanism has a critical dimension which offers a solution to one of the weaknesses in the critical theory tradition: failure to respond to the challenges of globalization and intercultural communication. Critical cosmopolitanism, he proposes, is an approach that is not only relevant to social scientific analysis but also normatively grounded in a critical attitude. Delanty's argument for a critical, sociologically oriented cosmopolitanism aims to avoid, on the one hand, purely normative conceptions of cosmopolitanism and, on the other, approaches that reduce cosmopolitanism to the empirical expression of diversity. He attempts to take cosmopolitan theory beyond the largely Western context with which it has generally been associated, claiming that cosmopolitan analysis must now take into account non-Western expressions of cosmopolitanism.