A Modest Defense of the Government’s Legal and Policy Confusion Re Sony The attribution problem makes it very hard for the public to know if North Korea in fact attacked Sony, the precise damage Sony suffered, and the party responsible for the (apparent) counter-attack in North Korea. Attribution problems are present in other realms of conflict, of course. Some kinetic terrorist attacks leave no fingerprint; covert action is by definition designed to avoid attribution; and the like. But as the Sony episode shows, what is distinctive about cyber-conflict is the pervasiveness of the attribution problem. The problem makes it hard to judge the seriousness of the attack, the justification for the response, and the proportionality (and, more broadly, legality) of the response. The cyber context highlights how much our legal and political categories depend on knowing who did what. lawfareblog/2014/12/a-modest-defense-of-the-governments-legal-and-policy-confusion-re-sony/
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 11:58:25 +0000