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weapons and poison gas. Nations can site the use of an information weapon to
suspend, modify, or terminate certain treaties related to indiscriminate weapons,
since “a fundamental change of circumstances may justify a party to regard its
treaty obligations as suspended or terminated.” 558
Possible Future Law Enforcement Techniques
There are several techniques that law enforcement agencies can use to
intervene in the contents of international networks, but each must be
coordinated with the appropriate authorities of the network and country
concerned. The urgency of protecting critical infrastructure may in fact push the
development of a properly designed active defense concept that is “precleared”
by the courts for action. 559
Computer systems may be developed that prevent the sabotage or
destruction of friendly systems. As computers are unbounded systems, “no one
has complete and precise knowledge of the topology or state of the system.
Central control is nonexistent or ineffective.” 560 Programming pioneer David
Fischer developed just such a system, known as Easel, to work around
unbounded systems such as the power grid. Easel can perform abstract
reasoning easier than older programming methods. This allows Easel to predict
how a new cyberpathogen or software bug might cripple a system. Law
enforcement agencies would benefit from his expertise.
Closer cooperation between the National Institute for Standards and
Testing’s Information Technology Laboratory (ITL, mentioned earlier) with
law enforcement agencies is another way to increase law enforcement
techniques. There has been past cooperation. For example, the ITL’s National
Software Reference Library compares the files’ electronic “fingerprints” to
those in its database, allowing investigators to focus on suspicious or unknown
files identified during a sweep. This automatically eliminates 40-95% of the
files, and saves hundreds of man-hours. ITL also is working to protect the
Internet Infrastructure from cyber terrorism, and it just helped develop the
Advanced Encryption Standard for protecting sensitive, nonclassified
information. The computer security division recently put out guidelines for
federal agencies on risk management and contingency planning. Finally, work
is being done to strengthen the security of the domain name system since the
558 Ibid., p. 39.
559 Ibid., p. 54.
560 W. Wayt Gibbs, “Survival in an Insecure World,” Scientific American, May 2002, p.
39.
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