This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

The closest the United States has ever gotten to controlling the export of hacking tools and surveillance technology is the Wassenaar Arrangement. Named for the Dutch town where the arrangement was originally signed in 1996, the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies was designed to replace the previous set of Cold War norms used by Western states to keep weapons and military technology from making their way to Russia, China, and their communist satellites. Wassenaar’s goal was to control the sale of conventional weapons systems and dual-use technologies—sophisticated computers, centrifuges, drones—from reaching despots in Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. Its original signatories included the United States and forty-one other countries, including most of Europe, Argentina, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom, and though the arrangement is nonbinding, member-states agree to establish and enforce their own domestic laws to control the sale of items on Wassenaar’s control list, which they update every December.