http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/23/should-the-u-s-allow-companies-to-hack-back-against-foreign-cyber-spies/
By Max Fisher
The Washington Post
May 23, 2013
Foreign hackers do remarkable damage by breaking into American
companies, stealing intellectual property worth enormous amounts of
money, swiping proprietary secrets for military technology or other uses
and, in the case of some recent Chinese attacks, even exposing U.S.
counterintelligence efforts. The Obama administration has made clear
that it takes the threat seriously and is escalating efforts to stop it.
One suggestion increasingly floated in the private sector is to allow
companies to “hack back.” Current U.S. law makes it illegal for private
firms to launch retaliatory cyberattacks, and the issue is highly
controversial. But it’s entering the mainstream.
A new report, from a private commission on intellectual property theft
chaired by former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman and former
director of national intelligence Dennis Blair, raised the possibility
of changing the law to allow for hacking back. While it stopped short of
directly advocating such attacks, it did call for a milder, legal form
of hacking back and said the United States should consider changing the
law if other measures fail.
It can be tough to talk about allowing corporations to run their own
mini cyberwars because, like hacking itself, no one is exactly sure what
sorts of norms will develop and where the technology will lead us. The
conversations tend heavily toward the hypothetical. Advocates of
“hacking back” point out that criminal and state-run hackers are only
getting better, and that because they risk little by attacking purely
defensive systems, they will simply persist until they succeed.
Opponents warn that such a serious escalation could erode what few
cyber-norms already exist, turning the Internet into a battlefield where
not just rogue states and freelance criminals, but a lot very rich
corporations, are invading privacy, stealing data and otherwise hacking
for the specific purpose of doing damage.
[...]
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