Our salt risks draining into cyberspace

[Commentary] How coherent are the doctrines that underpin cybersecurity strategies both of nation-states and other organizations?

The limits of existing civil law in England were demonstrated recently by the furor over gossip on Twitter. Similarly, the United Nations Charter definition of “armed attack” is limited in cyberspace. We have no transnational law for cyberspace. Old frameworks and political structures will not be able to legislate by custom, treaty or domestic statute at the pace cyberthreats evolve. The government urgently needs to recruit an elite cadre of innovators able to lead a workforce with a different, entrepreneurial ethos – including hackers – as solvers of puzzles. Rather than developing security measures in bunkers or silos, we should be bold and emulate the “small world clusters” that brought together the world’s best health laboratories to defeat the Sars epidemic in weeks, not years.