The State of Cyber Norms

It's worth pointing out that despite the insanely optimistic musings (1,2,3) from everyone in the State Dept about the progress of the international relations world on cyber norms, the reality is a disaster.

The shining light, which State and the Obama administration completely get credit for is the dissolution of the Chinese State economic espionage strategy. But that ignores the overall picture:

• The UN GGE process misses clear players (Russia/China) and has at the root the issue of nobody agreeing on any of the definitions of the words they use
• NATO's Tallinn process has many key problems (i.e. it is largely disconnected from the realities of the domain's technical characteristics) 
• The US's transparency about our SIGINT process has been met with nothing from its European partners, who continue to batter us with hypocritical cries about privacy post-Snowden

To put it in the clearest possible terms: Nobody at State had the foresight to delimit "Not messing with our election" to the  Russians, which meant we had to get into a last minute massive escalation game with them instead. In addition to the lack of progress on any realistic front from our more traditional international efforts, this is the kind of total failure that needs to be publicly recognized.

Here is an example paper exploring what collateral damage might mean. Imagine trying to apply international law or norms to a domain where you don't even know what collateral damage is yet!