Computers Are Weapons of War

[Geee]

American Spectator:

In the spring of 2007, Russian computer experts hacked into Estonia’s government computer networks, blocked them from functioning, and brought the Estonian government to a standstill.

On August 8, 2008, Russian tanks invaded the disputed South Ossetia region between Russia and Georgia, a former Soviet satellite state. One day before the tanks rolled in, Russian cyber attacks defaced Georgian government websites and then made what are called “distributed denial of service” attacks, which effectively blocked the use of the computers by overwhelming the computer servers with a volume of traffic too great for them to handle and causing them to cease functioning. Russian cyberwarriors also managed to hack into Georgian servers to plant malicious software. “Malware,” as computer security experts call it, modifies a computer’s software to either prevent it from functioning or to revise its functions to benefit the attacker.

We don’t know of any other massive attacks such as the Russian strikes on Estonia and Georgia from unclassified sources. Several nations—China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, among them—try to limit their citizens’ access to the Internet to prevent the spread of dissent. Myanmar (née Burma) has apparently cut off Internet access twice—once in late 2007 and again in November 2010—to place an electronic Iron Curtain around its population.
Sources say that a “cyber criminal,” not a national entity, made successive—and partially successful—attacks on the Brazilian power grid in November 2009.

What a nation does to limit its own citizens’ freedom is an act of oppression. But when one nation uses computers as a weapon against another, is it war?

No one would say that the Russian tank invasion was not an act of war. But what about the cyber attacks? Were they something less, or truly an act of war using an unconventional weapon?

THE TERM "ARMED CONFLICT" is used to describe war. But what is war? Is a war only a war if conventional weapons are used to fight it?
Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz’s 1832 text On War defined war to be “…an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” The aggressive use of armed force—like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941—fits that definition perfectly. Following Pearl Harbor, our two choices were to surrender or declare war, and we properly chose the latter course. The attack, and the declaration of war, not only united Americans in pursuit of victory but also justified our use of all of the force we could devise and deploy to win.