Cyber war-wary

DAVID TOHN’S June 11 op-ed “Digital trench warfare’’ is a great example of how a man with a hammer thinks every problem is a nail. Here we have an army officer arguing that we should militarize what is essentially a criminal problem. Our record of declaring “war’’ on abstract nouns (drugs, terror, etc.) is mostly a record of failure to achieve the objective while inflicting heavy collateral damage on people unfortunate enough to be in the neighborhood of military operations. Tohn’s suggestion to turn corporations into liability-free vigilantes in this new war on cyber crime is also madness, since corporations are barely, if at all, restrained by the current legal framework from trampling on the rights of the powerless in their pursuit of profit. Finally, Tohn’s remark that medieval instability led to the growth of international law betrays a weak grasp of history. There were theorists of just war (such as Augustine) active in late antiquity, well before the Middle Ages; and the Treaty of Westphalia, often seen as the founding document in the current legal framework of nation states, was signed in 1648, long after the medieval period ended.