Ethics and Cyber Warfare

"State sponsored hacktivism" constitutes a wholly new alternative to conventional armed conflict. This book explores the ethical and legal dimensions of this "soft" mode warfare grounded in a broad revisionist approach to military ethics and "just war theory" that results in a new code of ethics for today's "cyber warriors." In this work, an internationally-respected authority in military ethics describes a wholly new kind of cyber conflict that has utterly confounded the predictions of earlier experts in information warfare. Comparing this "state-sponsored hacktivism" to the transformative impact of "irregular warfare" in conventional armed conflict, Lucas offers a critique of legal approaches to governance, and outlines a new approach to ethics and "just war" reasoning (grounded in the political philosophies of Alasdair MacIntyre, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas) that provides both a framework for understanding these newly-emerging norms of practice for cyber conflict, and the basis for a professional "code of ethics" for the new generation of "cyber warriors."