Cyber Archive

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull made his first visit to Washington as prime minister this week, where he met with President Barack Obama and gave a national security speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). In his speech at CSIS, Turnbull discussed the Syrian civil war and expressed confidence in the fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State, which he referred to as ISIL. The coalition against the Islamic State “will win,” he said, “by targeting ISIL militarily, using local ground forces supported by coalition air power, weapons and training; curbing ISIL finances; stopping foreign fighter flows; and […]

For the past five years, the focus of international negotiations on cybersecurity has been the creation of norms, or an expectation among governments on how each one will behave. To set a baseline for responsible state behavior, governments have tried extending current international commitments and international law into cyberspace, while discussing where new norms are needed. But when it comes to espionage, by design, international law does not apply: There are no commitments not to spy, as countries don’t want formal constraints on their intelligence agencies. While there are implicit norms that guide spying, they are few in number, flexible […]