WMU prof helps define how cyberwar can be fought ethically

If an enemy shuts down your banking system in an act of cyberwarfare what is the ethical response?

A Western Michigan University professor has been awarded a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study such issues.

Dr. Fritz Allhoff, associate professor of philosophy, is working on a collaborative project with California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and the Naval Postgraduate School titled "Safeguarding Cyberspace with Ethical Rules for Cyberwarfare."

Allhoff and his colleagues on the research team will address the ethics of cyberwarfare. The team also has been invited to participate at an event sponsored by NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence in Tallinn, Estonia. They will write a final report for submission to the National Science Foundation that will be made widely available. A book and a series of workshops also are part of their work

Allhoff says there is a growing amount of literature on cyberspace technology and strategy, but more study of the ethics of cyberwarfare is needed as a means of guiding law and policy.

"New technologies tend to get into play before the ethics have been thought out," Allhoff says. "One of our goals on this project is to try to stay in front of the ethical issues in cyberwarfare, hoping to promote dialogue and policy that is ethically informed."

Cyberwarfare poses problems to standard legal frameworks governing armed conflict, Allhoff says, including the assumption that warfare, by definition, involves physical attack.

"A big part of what we're doing is trying to figure out how to understand traditional concepts in just-war theory and how they map onto the debate in cyberwarfare," Allhoff says.

Writer: Kathy Jennings, Second Wave Media
Source Mark Schwerin, Western Michigan University

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WMU prof helps define how cyberwar can be fought ethically

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