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Cyber IR Seminar: Cyber Deterrence as a Strategic and Legal Problem

Speaker: Jack Goldsmith and Roger Hurwitz , Harvard Law School and CSAIL
Date: April 1 2010
Time: 4:00PM to 6:00PM
Location: 32-D463
Host: Roger Hurwitz, CSAIL

Deterrence has been frequently proposed as a strategy for defending cyber based military resources, national assets and critical infrastructures. The National Research Council has recently initiated a project "aimed at fostering a broad, multidisciplinary examination of strategies for deterring cyberattacks on the United States and the possible utility of these strategies for the U.S. government. As part of this project, the responsible committee is issuing a call for papers that address questions relevant to this broad topic." But some of the papers it receives will likely question whether deterrence can work in cyberspace, given the domain's large number of actors with attack capabilities, numerous attack vectors, problems of attribution, lack of mutually recognized thresholds, and legal constraints on retaliation. Perhaps, then, its practice in cyberspace might instead cause escalation and instability. This seminar will overview the strategic logic of deterrence, its use in the Cold War and arms control scenarios, and conditions for its success. The speakers will review the laws of war, international treaties and other factors, within and outside cyberspace that might enhance or thwart the use of deterrence. For example, does it make a difference that actors who would use deterrent strategies are now interdependent at many levels in a networked world, whereas previously their interdependence consisted mainly in their capabilities of inflicting enormous damage on one another.

Jack Goldsmith is Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and an investigator with Explorations in Cyber International Relations, a multi-disciplinary research project funded by the Minerva Research Initiative. He specializes in international law, foreign affairs law, conflicts of law, and national security law. He is the author of dozens of articles on these and other subjects. His most recent publications are The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (Norton, 2007), Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World(Oxford University Press, 2006) (co-authored with Tim Wu) and (with Eric Posner) The Limits of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2005). He was a member of the committee that issued the National Research Council's 2009 report "Technology, Policy, Law, and Ethics Regarding U.S. Acquisition and Use of Cyberattack Capabilities." Before coming to Harvard, Goldsmith served as Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel from October 2003 through July 2004, and Special Counsel to the General Counsel to the Department of Defense from September 2002 through June 2003. Professor Goldsmith taught at the University of Chicago Law School from 1997 to 2002, and at the University of Virginia Law School from 1994 to 1997.

Roger Hurwitz is a research scientist at CSAIL and currently an investigator with Explorations in Cyber International Relations. His research includes the use and limitations of formal models for analyzing social interactions, group dynamics and international relations. He developed methodologies for measuring information flows at national and global levels and for the automated inference from actors' discussions of social interactions, their understanding and strategies for the "games" they were in. Hurwitz has a Ph.D. in political science from MIT and has taught modeling for social science at MIT, Northeastern and the Hebrew University.

For the announcement of the NRC Prize for Cyberdeterrence Research and Scholarship, see http://sites.nationalacademies.org/CSTB/CSTB_056215

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