282-Page Handbook Details Recommended Rules of Cyberwar Engagement

With cyberwar becoming more and more prevalent, one group is putting out actual rules recommending how to engage in it.

The Tallinn Manual – named for the Estonian capital where it was compiled – was created at the behest of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, a NATO think tank.

Their handbook, due to be published later this week, applies the practice of international law to the world of electronic warfare in an effort to show how hospitals, civilians and neutral nations can be protected in an information-age fight.

“Everyone was seeing the Internet as the ‘Wild, Wild, West,’” U.S. Naval War College Professor Michael Schmitt, the manual’s editor, said in an interview with the Associated Press before its official release. “What they had forgotten is that international law applies to cyberweapons like it applies to any other weapons.”

The manual takes existing rules on battlefield behavior, such as the 1868 St. Petersburg Declaration and the 1949 Geneva Convention, to the Internet, occasionally in unexpected ways.

Marco Roscini, who teaches international law at London’s University of Westminster, described the manual as a first-of-its-kind attempt to show that the laws of war – some of which date back to the 19th century – were flexible enough to accommodate the new realities of online conflict.

In 2011, President Barack Obama signed an executive order for how the United States could engage in cyberwarfare.

This new 282-page handbook has no official standing, but Roscini predicted that it would be an important reference as military lawyers across the world increasingly grapple with what to do about electronic attacks.

“I’m sure it will be quite influential,” he said, according to AP.

CONTINUED AT: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/19/282-page-handbook-details-recommended-rules-of-cyberwar-engagement/

FOR THE FULL PUBLICATION, GO HERE:  http://www.ccdcoe.org/249.html