Conflating cyber attacks with threat of cyber war runs the risk of turning over control of the Internet to the Defense Department or intelligence agencies, said Bruce Schneier, the well-known security technologist.

During a moderated debate June 8 in Washington, D.C., Schneier argued that in order for the threat of cyber war to be serious, a threat of war must also be serious. "What you do with a threat of war is you call in the military, and you get military solutions," Schneier said. But what gets described as cyber warfare so far has been "kids playing politics," he said. The debate was hosted by Intelligence Squared, a New York City-based debate series charity.

War requires a nation-state attacking another nation-state with intent to "decimate its economy, overrun its land, threaten its people," said Marc Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who sided with Schneier during the debate.

Talk of cyber war is part of a long-running campaign to move control of the Internet, "the technical standards and the openness that we have enjoyed away from its current model to one that would give the intelligence community and the National Security Agency much greater authority to decide what people may or may not do on the Internet," Rotenberg said.

But openness and innovation on the Internet wouldn't necessarily be diminished by acknowledgment that the threat of cyber war is serious, said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School. Schneier's and Rotenberg's points are "worries about the remedy" rather an assessment of whether the threat of cyber war is plausible, Zittrain argued.

"Let us be truth tellers about the state of vulnerability in our networks and our endpoints and then deal with it from there," he said.

Preparations now for a cyber war would act as a form of deterrence, said Mike McConnell, now an executive vice president and leader of the National Security Business for Booz Allen Hamilton, previously the director of national intelligence from 2007 to 2009. The threat of cyber war is real, he said, citing the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, during which Georgian government websites were attacked.

"What happened was deliberate, it was rehearsed ahead of time, and it was effective at shutting down the Georgian government," he said.

For more:
- a webcast of the debate will be available on June 11, here

- or read a transcript of the debate (.pdf)

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