The Cyber Civil War: The Roles of Individuals in Cyber Warfare
Public and private actors engage in cyber warfare. In the private field, the role of individuals is rather limited: Individuals are usually either hackers or targets of cyber crimes. This paradigm could change soon, as individuals might now face a new threat: Information. In 2014, a group of hackers launched a cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, and released, inter alia, personally identifiable information on their employees, including email correspondence and information about executive salaries. This incident revealed a terrifying new reality: Cyber attacks could result in a revelation of our entire personal information held by third parties. Emails, search queries, credit card numbers, purchase history, and anything we do online could be posted for everyone to search and view. How does the U.S. legal system cope with this new information threat? Not well. Current legal measures are insufficient to deal with such new threats. Even if the target can recover monetary damages, legal remedies do not offer removal of most online information. Thus, legal intervention is required.
This research project scrutinizes the new threats to civilians in cyber warfare, emerging mostly from other civilians, and proposes a modest solution to the new informational threat. Its mission is to first examine the two traditional roles civilians play in the digital battlefield, both as attackers and as potential targets. Then, it locates the new threat of cyber warfare to civilians: Dissemination of personal information online. I intend to analyze the current legal measures available for civilians, and proving their insufficiency, and discusses the need for a forgetful Internet by introducing and analyzing the EU’s right to be forgotten. I argue that a right to be forgotten is a dangerous tool that would lead to Internet censorship and therefore propose a different legal-technological solution that could aid civilians in better coping with the new threat. Without such mechanism, we might be at risk of a digital civil war in cyberspace.
