Hi Bill, This is perhaps going off on something of a tangent, but I’m curious where you see this work fitting with the “Digital Geneva Convention” barrow that Microsoft have been pushing for the past few months (since February, I think?). From your description it sounds like it’s at least very much in the same space…
Cheers Chris > On 15 Nov 2017, at 14:34, Mark Blackman <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> On 15 Nov 2017, at 12:51, Bill Woodcock <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Not exactly... a diplomatic norm is a commonly-accepted agreement as to >> expected behavior. It’s essentially a step short of a treaty. >> >> The problem here is that the US, Russia, and China all want to preserve >> their “right” to conduct offensive cyber operations against anyone they >> want, any time they want, without it rising to the level of a diplomatic >> incident. Pretty much everyone else (but most actively the Dutch, >> Singaporeans, and French) agree that this is unacceptable behavior. But >> until diplomats agree on a definition of what exactly is unacceptable, when >> it’s unacceptable, in what context it’s unacceptable, by whom it’s >> unacceptable, and against whom it’s unacceptable, there isn’t sufficient >> consensus to constitute a norm. >> >> Once there’s a norm that’s clear and understandable for governments to agree >> to, we can start picking up momentum. When a lot of governments agree to >> it, violating it will become more and more diplomatically costly for the few >> governments that do. > > Would you say that the current administrations of China, the US and Russia > observe diplomatic norms in general? Possibly some norms are better than > none, but I am not so sure. > > - Mark > >
