The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger

Fifth, the world needs to move ahead with setting these norms of behavior even if governments are not yet ready. Classic arms-control treaties won’t work: they take years to negotiate and more to ratify. With the blistering pace of technological change in cyber, they would be outdated before they ever went into effect. The best hope is to reach a consensus on principles that begins with minimizing the danger to ordinary civilians, the fundamental political goal of most rules of warfare. There are several ways to accomplish that goal, all of them with significant drawbacks. But the most intriguing, to my mind, has emerged under the rubric of a “Digital Geneva Convention,” in which companies—not countries—take the lead in the short term. But countries must then step up their games too.