U.S. Congress Authorizes Offensive Use of Cyberwarfare 206
smitty777 writes "Congress has recently authorized the use of offensive military action in cyberspace. From the December 12th conference on the National Defense Authorization Act, it states, 'Congress affirms that the Department of Defense has the capability, and upon direction by the President may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend our Nation, Allies and interests, subject to: (1) the policy principles and legal regimes that the Department follows for kinetic capabilities, including the law of armed conflict; and (2) the War Powers Resolution.' According to the FAS, 'Debate continues on whether using the War Powers Resolution is effective as a means of assuring congressional participation in decisions that might get the United States involved in a significant military conflict.'"
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
The moment nations - any nations, US included - decided that the Internet was territory that could be owned rather than a virtual complex of ideas where data merely happened to reside in certain machines at certain times and where wiring merely happened to be the transport of choice for now, cyberwarfare was inevitable. That the Internet has adopted a spanning tree topology in many places, rather than a mesh topology, has worsened things. It's very easy to set up roadblocks on a spanning tree, it's much much harder to shut down a mesh.
(If you can't own it and can't prevent others using it, then you have nothing you can fight over. Ownership and conflict are only possible where resource denial is possible. Which is fine for end-points, I've no problem with end-points being owned and governed, but it should never have become fine for the backbone.)
Re:Screw effective. How about Constitutional? (Score:2, Informative)
Fun fact: The United States has only formally declared war 5 times!
(our last one was WWII, but that's closer to 70 years now)
Re:Americans (Score:5, Informative)
(Just like how the whole don't-blame-American-citizens-for-Iraq argument stopped making sense after Bush won re-election.)
It did?
By my math there were just over 62 million votes counted for Bush in 2004. Estimated population of the United States in 2004 was just shy of 293 million. If simple division serves me right then that means over 78% of the U.S. population did not vote for Bush in 2004 (either by voting for someone else, not voting, or being ineligible). That is hardly a large enough number for anyone to do what they want and claim some sort of democratic mandate.
A Republic is not a Democracy. While the people who voted for him might have backed his policies that hardly means "America" did. The same can be said for any U.S. president.
Re:Finally (Score:4, Informative)
Uh.. neutral utopia for spreading ideas and knowledge? I'm pretty sure that (D)ARPA had no intention of neutrality in terms of who was "supposed to" benefit from the communication.....