Cyberwar

Rules For Cyberwarfare Still Unclear, Even As U.S. Engages In It

When Defense Secretary Ashton Carter landed in Iraq for a surprise visit this week, he came armed with this news: More than 200 additional U.S. troops are headed to that country. They'll join the fight to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State.

As that battle unfolds on the ground, a parallel war against ISIS is unfolding in cyberspace.

U.S. officials have confirmed to NPR that over the past year, the cyber campaign has taken off. They describe an escalation in operations, from using cybertools to geolocate a particular ISIS leader to hacking into and then conducting surveillance on a particular computer.

The activity occurs even as the rules for cyberwarfare remain a work in progress. Among the outstanding questions: Who's in charge when the U.S. wages cyberwar?

"The chain of command is clear on paper," says Susan Hennessey, who served as a lawyer at the National Security Agency until November 2015. "It's much more difficult to understand in practice."
...Sulmeyer notes that the Pentagon now officially recognizes cyberspace as the fifth domain of warfare, after land, sea, air and space. That — combined with the urgency of the campaign against ISIS — is prompting military planners to think creatively, he says, about both how to govern and how to weaponize the cyber battlefield.