All posts tagged: cybersecurity

Stock Market on iPhone

Financial Weapons of War

A new type of warfare is upon us. In this new mode of war, finance is the most powerful weapon, bullets are not fired, financial institutions are the targets, and almost everyone is at risk. Instead of smart bombs, improvised explosives, and unmanned drones –– economic sanctions, financial restrictions, and cyber programs are the weapons of choice. This is the reality of modern financial warfare. This Article offers an early examination of this new mode of war. It explores the new financial theater of war, analyzes the modern arsenal of financial weapons, highlights emerging legal tensions, and proposes key recommendations for current and future financial warfare. The Article begins with a general survey of the modern financial infrastructure, the emerging battlefield of modern warfare. Next, it provides a more detailed inventory of the financial weapons of war. It accounts for traditional weapons like economic sanctions, anti-money laundering regulations, and banking restrictions, as well as cyber weapons like distributed denial-of-service attacks, data manipulation hacks, and destructive intrusions. It also explains how these weapons are used in …

Hollis_Cyberlaw_June2015

Autonomous Legal Reasoning: Legal and Ethical Issues in the Technologies of Conflict

One of the highlights of my Fall semester was the opportunity to host a one-day workshop at Temple Law on how autonomous technology may impact the future of international humanitarian law (IHL) and the lawyers who practice it.  With co-sponsorship from the International Committee of the Red Cross (specifically, Rob Ramey and Tracey Begley) as well as Gary Brown of Marine Corps University, we wanted to have an inter-disciplinary conversation on the way autonomy may implicate the practice of law across a range of new technologies, including cyberwar, drones, and the potential for fully autonomous lethal weapons.  Although these technologies share common characteristics — most notably their ability (and sometimes their need) to operate in the absence of direct human control — discursive silos have emerged where these technologies tend to be discussed in isolation. Our workshop sought to bridge this divide by including experts on all three technologies from an array of disciplinary backgrounds, including IHL, political science, and ethics (see here for a list of participants).  Fortunately, the day itself lived up to the hype, with a detailed …