Cyberpeace: No military operations in the Internet!

Political measures demanded by FIfF:

No military operations in the Internet!

The FIfF seeks to raise public awareness of the penetration of cyberspace by military activity, which is a dangerous development. The cyberpeace campaign aims to mobilise civil society towards political action: against mass spying and violations of privacy, towards informational self-defense, towards demanding secure and uncomprimisable IT products and infrastructures. Civil society is called upon to articulate the need for protection on the political level, and to demand the respect of human rights in virtual environments.

The cyberpeace campaign demands:

to condemn each and every form of cyber warfare
a democratically shaped and controlled internet
an internet made for peace instead of spying and support for military actions

We regard the cyberpeace campaign as a first step on the way to sharpen the political will, by legislative initiatives and administrative measures, to aim for a comprehensive ban of offensive cyberweapons in international cooperation. We have specified this goal in a catalogue of 14 political demands.

The cyberpeace campaign receives support from the bridge foundation.

The FIfF Cyberpeace Demands: Political Measures

What is this about?
What is the problem?
What is our motivation for this campaign?

Our campaign begins by describing the problem. What risks, dangers and problems are created by cyber warfare?

Cyber warfare begins with mass surveillance of civil society – this violates our privacy and hence our dignity as an elementary human right.
Surveillance is made possible by the manipulation of IT systems and the wilful introduction of vulnerabilities. As a consequence, computer and communications systems such as the internet, upon which our society is largely dependent, have become undependable and insecure. For the sake of cyber warfare, the security and safety of civil IT infrastructure is being undermined and hollowed out.
State "cyber warriors" have become the most powerful hacker organisations of the world. Their attacks cannot be controlled and endanger civil systems besides their actual targets – such as systems whose role it is to ensure vital supplies (water, power), hospitals, or facilities such as chemical plants. The Stuxnet worm, targeted against an Iranian nuclear facility, spread throughout the world. At the present time, almost a dozen more obviously state-made Trojans are known to exist.
The deployment of cyber weapons by states constitutes by the standards of international law an act of war of substantial potential for escalation, which substantially endangers international security.
Spying and manipulation of computer systems can serve to prepare military operations, for example illegal drone attacks are prepared by inferring the geographic location of target persons. Hence, these operations are the basis of aggressive (warlike) operations.
Drone attacks cause the deaths of many innocent bystanders. Attacks based upon uncertain properties of targets ("signature strikes") are deadly attacks targeting people without even sufficient cause for suspicion.
Computer-assisted military operations create the illusion of a "clean" war and therefore lower the barrier for a military intervention.

These issues determine the goals of our campaign. The guiding vision is demilitarisation and exclusively peaceful use of the internet: we want cyberweapons to be banned, arms control extended to IT products, military and secret services disentangled from each other and strictly controlled. FIfF already pursues these goals in the professional field. In our catalogue of demands, we have expressed and justified these goals more precisely. Prime goals are:

the condemnation of each and every form of cyber warfare,
guaranteeing the integrity of the internet, the primacy of peaceful use, protecting it from military and political misuse,
ending mass espionage on civil society, which is incompatible with civil and constitutional rights,
rejecting a security doctrine that treats everyone as a suspect.

To attain this goal, we pursue the following short-term goals:

arms control provisions for offensive cyberweapons and surveillance technology,
renouncing the development and deployment of offensive cyberweapons,
mandatory disclosure of IT vulnerabilities, especially for authorities and companies,
legislation promoting spy-proof and human rights friendly communications infrastructures instead of pseudo-solutions such as DE-Mail.