Should the international laws be amended to consider state-led cyber attacks an act of war in additional to traditional aggression? Seems like UN Security Council should deal with these matters.
International law barely exists and is unenforceable. If a superpower--especially a permanent Security Council member--wants to do something, there's absolutely no recourse. Look at Russia and Crimea. That's the most egregious violation of the notion of international law in recent history, and nothing of consequence happened. The big powers can do whatever they want, and the worst response will be token economic sanctions. China is so economically intertwined with the world that nothing at all would happen unless they nuked someone.
I am not Russian, and have nothing to do with Russia or Ukraine or whatever (I am Brazillian, of Iberian descent).
Still, Crimea was not a "invasion" or "conquest".
Long story short:
Russia invaded Crimea in 1700s, taking it from Tartars.
When a Ukranian became leader of URSS, he "gave" Crimea to Ukraine, it was only nominal, nothing changed in Crimea itself, the place still was basically a navy base for Russia.
When URSS broke up, because of previous decision, it was decided Crimea was Ukranian, except most of population there is Russian (including a huge amount of Russian military), and their only warmwater seaport deep enough for the good warships Russia had, was still there, to make this work, Russia "rented" the place from Ukraine.
When Ukraine most recent revolution happened, do you think all the Russian military personel families that live there since 1700s would want to leave?
Now... if you want to claim what is happening in Donbass is a invasion, then that is more plausible.
> That's the most egregious violation of the notion of international law in recent history
There's a reason no country gives much of a second thought to international law. In the end it's purely about the optics and the optics are written by each superpower for whoever cares to listen to them. Case in point:
- Wage an asymmetric proxy war, invade a sovereign country, and annex one of their territories - Not OK.
- Find even a demonstrably false reason to wage declared war, invade a sovereign country, kill and torture combatants and civilians alike during the war and subsequent occupation - OK.
International law is a guideline and every country will interpret their own acts as righteous heroism and other countries' acts as barbaric violations of the law.
Increased encirclement & isolation (economic & political persona non grata) by a large group of the liberal affluent nations is the only approach that will work to curtail military attacks like this one. The CPC ego is extraordinarily fragile, the party's self-esteem gets injured very easily, and that should be taken advantage of. Essentially all the highest GDP per capita nations are liberal allies, they should band together and begin excluding China in unison if these military attacks continue.
It's the sort of organizing the US used to be good at, and is presently failing at miserably (for obvious reasons). Germany, France and Britain are also falling down on the job as well (because they're economically scared), so there's plenty of blame to go around.
> Germany, France and Britain are also falling down on the job as well (because they're economically scared), so there's plenty of blame to go around.
In the case of Britain we've had a disastrous handling of the pandemic which is still on going (both the illness and the handling of it) on top of Brexit and incredibly poor leadership.
It'll be a decade before we return to something like normality and even then it will be in a new reality.
Leaving the EU lost us our ability to stand up to the US or China in any meaningful way - for them we are just another Tuesday.
It's funny you say that, because I'm a security engineer and I talked to loads of other security engineers who didn't question it. People at the top of the field. It looked bogus as hell at the time, but you couldn't easily say so.
Hackers are as susceptible to partisan politics as anyone else. At least we now have the benefit of the CrowdStrike President's declassified testimony.
It took me forever to find out that the “back channel” with trump tower and Alfa Bank was a hacked Point-of-sale terminal in the lobby sending spam mail. Snopes still laughably lists this as “unproven”
I remember at the time thinking “what are they doing, using an IRC channel?”
I was screaming inside when the FBI started waving around that they had evidence and all they could show for it in public at the time was a handful of incoming HTTP requests from Russian IPs.
I get hundreds of MB of traffic from Russian, Chinese, etc IP addresses every week scanning for drupal/wordpress/etc vulnerabilities. It hardly meant anything.
Worse still is that we know that this happens and my colleagues still just go along with whatever companies like CrowdStrike or Trail of Bits or whoever say. Like we make business decisions based on their word alone. They're popular, so they must be correct. Group think is real and there's large numbers of us who aren't as capable as we claim to be. 95% of the work for most is checking the boxes on compliance questionnaires and getting shut down/stalled by the engineering & ops teams who actually make their companies money.
The US has the better navy but china has a crap tonne of anti-ship missiles (because of the US having the better navy) and that's before the risk of it going nuclear.
I wonder how far the US would actually go to protect Taiwan, would they risk someone tossing a nuke or the situation getting spectacularly out of hand.
Even a large number of people in Taiwan today do not want to be associated with the RoC. There is a growing sentiment to express a distinctly Taiwanese identity.
The Tawainese government used to rule mainland China back when it was known as the Republic of China, before retreating to Taiwan during a civil war.
They were also the "China" entity that was the founding member of the UN. It was only a few years after the UN's founding that the Communist Party won the civil war and formed a new country (the People's Republic of China), yet it took several decades for the UN to officially recognize them as the representative of "China".
The argument to make isn't that they should have a mandate to rule mainland China, nor even that they should be mainland China's representative of the UN. But rather that they should be their own representative at the UN, and have claim to the permanent seat of the Security Council that mainland China currently holds, since it was originally theirs to begin with.
It's a nuclear strategy that'd cause all hell to break loose if that were ever attempted, but is a plausible enough argument that it could likely be forced through if enough parties truly wanted to strip China of their veto power.
I think this would be a functionally useless move that might hasten the coming of a potential ww3. It doesn't seem like a solution to me, just provocation. It doesn't make the PRC less powerful, it doesn't change how much of the world's manufacturing has been moved there, it doesn't change who owes them money, or their cyber abilities/actions.
What does it do but exclude them from any dialog to make force and violence more likely alternatives?
What would the UN do with this? Quite a few wars in recent memory involved members of the security council, and the same would likely apply to cyberwarfare.
