[Infowarrior] - Information Warfare and Civilian Populations

[Richard Forno]

(c/o dg) 

 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1833515

  "Information Warfare and Civilian Populations: How the Law of War
  Addresses a Fear of the Unknown"

  Goettingen Journal of International Law, Vol. 3, No. 1, p. 373, 2011

  Imagine a civilian communications system is being temporarily relied
  upon by an opposing military force for vital operations. If one
  launches a computer network attack against the communications system,
  the operation may disable the opposing force's ability to function
  adequately and, as a result, prompt their surrender. The alternative
  course of action is to launch a traditional kinetic weapons attack in
  the hopes of inflicting enough casualties on the troops to induce
  surrender. Given these options, the law of war would encourage the
  utilization of the computer network attack because it would result in
  less unnecessary suffering. But is the same true if we are unsure of
  the collateral consequences of the computer network attack on a large
  civilian population that also relies on this communications system? For
  instance, because civilians use the same communications system to
  gather critical information, disabling the system might result in
  rioting, civil disorder, serious injuries, and deaths. Further,
  civilians may be unable to call for help, seek out medical assistance,
  or locate emergency response centers. Given these unknown yet
  potentially severe collateral consequences to civilians, it becomes
  less clear that a proportionality analysis under the law of war would
  favor the computer network attack over the traditional kinetic
  operation. In this article, Professor Lucian E. Dervan examines the
  application of the law of war to information operations and analyses
  the role of the Geneva Convention's utilitarian goals in determining
  the validity of computer network attacks against dual-use civilian
  objectives.

 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1833515