The age of cyberwar is here. We can't keep citizens out of the debate

[G_j]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/28/cyberwar-age-citizens-need-to-have-a-say

David E Sanger

Unlike nuclear weapons, there is no clear protocol for when cyberwarfare should be used, or how to respond to an attack

Sat 28 Jul 2018 00.00 EDT

In almost every classified Pentagon scenario for how a future confrontation with Russia and China, even Iran and North Korea, might play out, the adversary’s first strike against the United States would include a cyber barrage aimed at civilians. It would fry power grids, stop trains, silence cellphones and overwhelm the internet. In the worst-case scenarios, food and water would begin to run out; hospitals would turn people away. Separated from their electronics, and thus their connections, Americans would panic, or turn against one another.

The Pentagon is planning for this scenario because it knows many of its own war plans open with similarly paralyzing cyber-attacks against our adversaries, reflecting new strategies to try to win wars before a shot is fired. Glimpses of what this would look like have leaked out in recent years, partly thanks to Edward JSnowden, partly because a mysterious group called the Shadow Brokers – suspected of close links to Russian intelligence – obtained terabytes of data containing many of the “tools” that the National Security Agency used to breach foreign computer networks. It didn’t take long for some of those stolen cyberweapons to be shot back at America and its allies, in attacks whose bizarre-sounding names, like WannaCry, suddenly appeared in the headlines every week.

Yet the secrecy surrounding these programs obscures most public debate about the wisdom of using them, or the risks inherent in losing control of them. The government’s silence about America’s new arsenal, and its implications, poses a sharp contrast to the first decades of the nuclear era.

The horrific scenes of destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only seared the national psyche, but they made America’s destructive capabilities – and soon Russia’s and China’s – obvious and undeniable. Yet even while the government kept the details classified – how to build atomic weapons, where they are stored, and who has the authority to order their launch – America engaged in a decades-long political debate about when to threaten to use the bomb and whether to ban it.

Those arguments ended up in a very different place from where they began: in the 1950s the United States talked casually about dropping atomic weapons to end the Korean war; by the 80s there was a national consensus that the US would reach for nuclear weapons only if our national survival was at stake.
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