I don’t know if this has become popular news or widely known yet, but currently Estonia is coming under massive Denial-of-service attacks which lead to massive internet blackouts throughout the country- so much so that the Government had to block of internet access to outside countries to keep local services up.
One Estonian businessman from the Economist article claimed,
This is important as Estonia is generally regarded as a high tech economy and this is causing serious damage to their economy so it is far more important than just simple vandals doing it for laughs.
Especially as many are claiming that this whole affair is being orchestrated by Russia due to political concern and for Putin’s benefit which there is some evidence to suggest.
In addition to all this I’m wondering why Electronic attacks aren’t considered ‘an attack against all’ according to NATO as it is very possible that if this is sustained it could do as much damage as missiles fired over a border. Also worth thinking about is the accusations made from America a few months ago regarding China’s supposed intrusion into American MoD networks.
What do you think the response of Estonia’s allies in NATO and the EU should be?
(About Estonia)
(About US-China but I couldn’t find any good links)
In any case, this is pretty serious, and surely an economic attack. However, economic attacks fall into a bit of a gray area here as far as collective security arrangements go.
I think we need to help the Estonians as much as we can, obviously, while trying to avoid a shooting war in the process.
" . . . a big hello to all intelligent life-forms everywhere. And to everyone else out there, the secret is ‘Bang the rocks together, guys.’"’
Seriously, rockets, tanks etc. etc. can easily be traced back to where they came from. A distributed network of grannies and rented botnets blasting the Estonian government network is a completely different thing.
It does seem that there’s always a first though, it’ll be interesting to see what NATO does do.
Because the government is not particularly nice. The Estonians opted to removed a Russian statue from a city plaza and move it to a cemetery. Given how the Russians were rather disinclined to release their satellite states in the '90s this is a wonderful opportunity to emphasize the benefits of not pissing them off.
Except that the attacks have been traced back to Russia- its just not known whether they’re controlled by the Kremlin or not.
Many people advocate action against Iran for sponsoring terrorism in nearby states even though evidence is mostly circumstantial, I see this as a similar issue,
if you follow me?
(and I just realised I put in the wrong link for the US-China thing)
So you want Estonia to invoke Article 5 based on attacks originating from within Russia but not necessarily from Russian agencies. That seems questionable, especially since your own articles mention that
So Article 5 is irrelevant.
Now as for your Iran analogy, that would be a military action taken by an individual state, not by the alliance.
There’s nothing stopping Estonia from taking on Russia, aside from the lack of a death wish of course.
So maybe I should clarify what I’m interested in. And that is debating about why it isn’t considered an act of war and about whether as computing becomes more and more integrated with how society works this will eventually change.
This debate has come up in different forms, you know, going back to not only the Gulf War but also the OPEC actions of the 1970s. It is clear that economic pressure can present an Article 5 challenge to NATO, yet there is little agreement as to how bad the threat needs to be before action may be taken. It seems to be applied situationally.
Here’s the problem, a legitimate state is ultimately responsible for all military actions initiated from its boundaries. When 3rd parties begin operating from within the geographic region controlled by state it becomes a mess. See last year’s tiff in Lebanon.
Now what happens when no one controls specific regions? What happens when those attacks are remotely triggered and offer sufficient plausible deniability?
It will eventually be an act of war but it’ll require controls on whatever the internet grows into.
This is another example of international regimes and individual state laws not catching up to the times.
A massive internet denial of service attack is roughly the modern day equivalent of the letters of marque authorizing privateering (which often brought about open warfare between states.) It’ll just take time for collective security arrangements to address it, and it will also be a bit murkier because it’s always harder to tell which government (if any) sponsored the attacks. Although sometimes it was difficult to directly prove a specific privateer was operating under the auspices of a specific government, governments were quick to deny it if one of their privateers were caught in many cases–in some cases they weren’t however and would openly reward their privateers (ala Francis Drake.)
It is similar. That does not mean “action,” in the military sense, would be wise in either case. Economic sanctions, perhaps – but consider the economic effects (on the West) of putting up trade barriers to an economy the size of Russia’s.
Besides, this is too trivial a provocation to restart the Cold War, even on a rhetorical level.
Sure, but wouldn’t the knowledge that such an action would be considered an act of war considerably dissuade anyone from taking that action in the first place?
To take a wider view then, how would you expect a larger nation such as America or the UK to act if it was to come under such a concerted attack from - within another hostile country.
I doubt either of them would permit it to go on for this long.
This is a really interesting issue. This is evidence of something I have thought for a long time. Whenever people talked about the demise of Russia, I always thought that Russia was becoming one of the most modern militaries in the world. A true modern military would consist of cyberwarfare and well basically, ninjas. Russia is turning into a mafia state. Their wars will be conducted through espionage primarily.
In this case Russia is just telling Estonia, “No, you still belong to us.”
Did anyone hear about a Russian law that makes it legal for them to kill enemies of the regime in any foreign nation?