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Comment by cubecul | Hacker News Reader

The title is an interesting question, and I would recommend "How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon" by Rosa Brooks to dig into this question more.

The basic premise is that our simple "war vs. peacetime" framework no longer works.

Is cyberwarfare war? Maybe, maybe not.

What about one-off drone killings? The US definitely doesn't consider that war. But when you're at peace, killing someone like that is totally not OK.

What about US military involvement in building infrastructure in developing nations? Probably depends on which country it is, and what "infrastructure" means.

I just never really thought about this question much before, and I thought it was a thought-provoking read (spoiler: no answers provided) if you haven't thought about it either.

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The framework works just fine. But it is in the warmongers' interest to blur the lines - writing off acts of aggression as not war (yet somehow still not crime) hinders democratic oversight. Meanwhile propagandizing that we're in some continual low level war (just as in 1984) increases their status, lines their pockets, implies a need for wider society to sacrifice, and justifies the use of a massive standing army for mercenary operations.

Framing remote bit twiddling itself as war is frankly ridiculous. Attempted exploits are the Internet's background radiation - its sine qua non is to cross jurisdictions!

If a hacking incident deliberately causes missiles to launch, or disables communication/defenses as a prelude to a physical attack, I'd call that an act of war. Anything short of this overt nature is simply negligence by someone not securing their systems before blithely hooking them up to the Internet, and then looking for an ominous scapegoat after they can't simply bust up some 12 year old's bedroom to soothe their own ego.

I do look forward to seeing if the snake oil industry starts backpeddling on all that state actor saber rattling, now that they will be getting hired to write reports justifying insurance coverage.

Like other aspects of war I think this also depends on variables.

Was it war when German Uboote sank our supply ships enroute to the UK? Not for a while. Was of war when Iran captured US navy seamen in the Arabian gulf?

Is it war when NoKo does the Sony hack? If they start shelling SoKo and they also pull some “cyber” to use military lingo, then it’ll probably be war. In the meantime it’s more like spying/sabotage (which can be part of war, but by themselves aren’t)

>Was of war when Iran captured US navy seamen in the Arabian gulf?

On January 12, 2016, two United States Navy riverine command boats were seized by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy after they entered Iranian territorial waters near Iran's Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf.

The policies in question are not paying were due to NotPetya. The Ukraine and Russia were in an open shooting war, and Russia loaded infected the Ukrainian tax commission's computer. When companies logged in to the Ukrainian computer, they became infected.

Was collateral damage done by this virus to say Maersk (who got the virus from their Ukraine subsidiary) or others an act of war?

A naive, and imo correct, response to this would be, "Has Congress declared war on the nation from which the attackers originated?" This assumes that the attackers were state sponsored.

If the answer to that is no, then if I were in the position to make a decision, i.e. a judge, I would say, "Sorry insurance company, this wasn't an act of war, it happened a year ago and Congress didn't declare war because of this attack; pay up."

That doesn't answer the questions you raised, e.g. is the the peacetime killing of non-combatants illegal, but it answers the question in the article.

So any attacks, including pearl harbor would fall outside the jurisdiction of 'war'. It would also mean that the U.S would likely never truly declare war via Congress since it would annul millions of insurances and would lead to insurance premiums going up to levels never seen before.

Based on this really small sample, would you still follow that rationale?

>It would also mean that the U.S would likely never truly declare war via Congress since it would annul millions of insurances and would lead to insurance premiums going up to levels never seen before.

How does this follow? If Congress declared war against Russia, that would mean that insurance companies could now refuse to pay out for any Russian "cyber attacks", that seems counter to what you just said?

Maybe I'm misreading.

GP already considered something like Pearl Harbor with a 1-year lag for war to be declared, later, in connection with the event.

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