According to a report published by the New York Times yesterday, when the civil uprising in Syria turned violent in the spring of 2011, key government agencies, such as the National Security Agency (NSA), produced a plan for cyberstrike against the Assad regime that would “essentially turn the lights out for Assad.”
However, President Obama has thus far declined to act against the regime either in cyberspace or through a kinetic attack, the Times reports.
Syria was not in a place where [Obama] saw strategic value in American intervention [in Syria,] and even covert attacks–of the kind he ordered against Iran during the first two years of his presidency–involved a variety of risks.
Of course, as the article points out, in addition to questions of justifiability, always part of the consideration over whether to deploy a cyber-offensive weapon is the issue of retaliation. In the case of Syria, “[W]hether . . . an attack on Syria’s air power, its electric grid or its leadership would prompt Syrian, Iranian or Russian retaliation” against the United States.
As Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution noted in a recently published book he co-authored with Allan Friedman, “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know”:
Here in the U.S. we tend to view a cyberattack as a de-escalation–it’s less damaging than airstrikes. . . . But elsewhere in the world it may be viewed as opening up a new realm of warfare.
We may soon see progress toward answering some of the questions that linger around the use of cyber-offensive weapons. Turkish Weekly reports that NATO plans to decide at an upcoming summit “whether to designate and treat cyber-attacks against its member states as military attacks,” such that a cyberattack on one member state would be “considered an attack against them all” under Article V of the alliance’s governing treaty.
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