When is a "cyber attack" an act of war?

Dennis Blair, the US Director of National Intelligence, addressed a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this week about the state of the internet as it relates to national security. "In so many words, Blair's testimony highlighted a question the intelligence community, the Defense Department, the White House and Congress have to answer: When is a cyber attack an act of war?" (via Oxblood)

• [nic0mac]

  With many of the city services being moved to networks and more automation being used this is a real problem.. If the hospital in city X has its has its maintenance network hacked so the backup generators will not start then the utility network is hacked to create a black out then there is a possibility of deaths occurring, if the hacks can be traced to a political group or foreign nation then yes it should be considered an act of war.

• [Kerov]

  So, when does something done on the Internet provide moral justification for mass extra-judicial killings?

  How about ‘never’? Yeah, ‘never’. That’s my answer.

  • [JoshuaZ]

    Kerov? Really? What if, to use an extreme example, someone turned all the traffic lights in a major city green simultaneously. People would die. Similar remarks apply to many other systems.

    And even then, many would disagree with this sort of attitude even if no deaths resulted in a direct fashion. If for example a cyber-attack did enough damage to the American infrastructure to seriously cripple the economy, would it not be justified to respond militarily?

    • [Kerov]

      If Joe Smith in Kansas City turns all of NYC’s traffic lights green, or crashes Wall Street, then I’d suggest it’s wrong to dispatch a B-52 to smart-bomb the heck out of his house. Or his neighborhood if we can’t narrow the source down to a single house.

      I don’t see how the morality of the situation changes substantially if the attacker is Vasya Pupkin in Tomsk.

    • [mdh]

      …cyberattack did enough damage to the American infrastructure to seriously cripple the economy, would it not be justified to respond militarily?

      Who cares what kind of attack it was? Let’s have the 81st Airborne storm Wall Street!

      MBA mills have done more damage to our economy than any of the supposedly nefarious islamic schools we hear so much about.