Aram Roston reported for The Air Force Times on comments by Harold Koh, the State Department’s head legal adviser, while speaking at a CyberComm conference. According to Koh, cyberattacks are subject to IHL and the laws of war and can amount to armed attacks (or a “use of force”). More importantly, Koh thought that to constitute a “use of force,” “a cyberattack would probably have to ‘proximately result in death, injury or significant destruction.'” I don’t know if the article meant to say that an armed attack requires “death, injury or significant destruction.”
The article mentioned that Koh “introduced a series of 10 legal principles about cyberwar.” I’ll be looking for those as they come out.
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