Cyber rules and the Russians

I’ve been meaning to mention a very interesting recent piece by Tom Gjelten in World Affairs, which is even more relevant now than when it was first published. It’s a good survey of attempts to create some kind of rules for cyber conflict, and it highlights the outsized ambitions of the International Telecommunications Union, an ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

I've been meaning to mention a very interesting recent piece by Tom Gjelten in World Affairs, which is even more relevant now than when it was first published. It's a good survey of attempts to create some kind of rules for cyber conflict, and it highlights the outsized ambitions of the International Telecommunications Union, an often sleepy UN agency, and its top official:

I’ve been meaning to mention a very interesting recent piece by Tom Gjelten in World Affairs, which is even more relevant now than when it was first published. It’s a good survey of attempts to create some kind of rules for cyber conflict, and it highlights the outsized ambitions of the International Telecommunications Union, an often sleepy UN agency, and its top official:

As the global telecommunication system has evolved, the ITU mission has declined in importance. But the spread of the Internet has put the ITU in a position to play a far more ambitious—and potentially troublesome—global role as an arbiter of what should be allowed in the cyber domain. If ITU Secretary General Hamadoun Touré gets his way, his 192 member countries will soon be drafting a global treaty to regulate state-on-state cyber behavior. In October 2009, Touré told a meeting of ITU members that “by the end of next year, we [need to] broker a global agreement in which every country commits itself not to attack another country first.” On the eve of an October 2010 ITU plenipotentiary conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, Touré reiterated his goal. “My dream is to have a cyber peace treaty,” he said.

The article has interesting perspective on the active role of the Russians in UN cyber negotiations. ITU chief Toure has a doctorate from a Moscow university and, according to Gjelten, "has been working hard to line up support among ITU member states for the Russian cyber agenda."

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

Tag: Russia

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