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Microsoft's President Brad Smith is calling for a Digital Geneva Convention:
Microsoft is calling for a Digital Geneva Convention, as global tensions over digital attacks continue to rise. The tech giant wants to see civilian use of the internet protected as part of an international set of accords, Brad Smith, the company's president and chief legal officer, said in a blog post.
The manifesto, published alongside his keynote address at the RSA conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, argued for codifying recent international norms around cyberwarfare and for establishing an independent agency to respond to and analyze cyberattacks.
From the blog post:
Just as the Fourth Geneva Convention has long protected civilians in times of war, we now need a Digital Geneva Convention that will commit governments to protecting civilians from nation-state attacks in times of peace. And just as the Fourth Geneva Convention recognized that the protection of civilians required the active involvement of the Red Cross, protection against nation-state cyberattacks requires the active assistance of technology companies. The tech sector plays a unique role as the internet's first responders, and we therefore should commit ourselves to collective action that will make the internet a safer place, affirming a role as a neutral Digital Switzerland that assists customers everywhere and retains the world's trust.
Also at The Seattle Times and USA Today.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday February 15 2017, @05:30PM
I'm not disagreeing. However that seems pretty off topic.
People love to argue about stuff that doesn't matter, but in a general sense the whole point of the Geneva Convention was to make war more humane. So no bayoneting prisoner, no medical experiments on prisoners, no torture, no intentionally attacking medics or wounded or hospitals although war being hell accidents will happen, etc. So these guys going on and on about Geneva Conventions this and that imply to me we'll put all the hospitals and nuclear power plants and delicious targets in general into maybe one big /8 of ip space and have a gentlemans agreement that national governments won't attack hospital networks but go ahead wipe every server facebook has or whatever. The problem is most internet attacks are like nuts and gangs and what amounts to pirates, so this is pretty useless. Hey all you people currently causing trouble, we put all the delicate high value stuff over here so we'd really appreciate it if you'd be nice and oh shit you just DDOSed the nuclear missile launch system resulting in an auto-launch, you bastards...
They also have the weird idea that tech companies are first responders and somehow responsible, which is pretty much like saying bicyclists who get run over by cars driven by illegal immigrants being pursued by police on the streets should work a little harder at treating their resulting medical problems because after all they are the first people on the scene of a car-bike accident and if they were smart enough to bicycle in plate mail at least some damage would be negated oh and by the way everyone else washes their hands of responsibility so I hope you got good medical coverage because the ER is gonna be expensive.
Finally the concept of a digital neutral Switzerland sounds weird as hell, did he post that on 4chan or IRC? Or he means swiss as in their legendary (now faded into legend) banking system in which case he means bitcoin should be centralized and controlled (by you know who to the sole advantage of you know who) or maybe he's just an idiot and is thinking of digital Switzerland as in chocolate and swiss army knives. In which case I think an e-store for selling chocolates is less important than a nuclear power plant SCADA system, and we already have a swiss army knife of the internet its called Perl, although some call it a swiss army chainsaw. Switzerland isn't neutral anyway, they are soundly on the establishment side and love getting involved in economic wars, they just don't have much of a military and their terrain is crap place to live, kinda like NYC in many ways if you think about it.
What I'm sayin is you're talking about what you'd like to see in international relations and I can't disagree much. But they're talking (mostly out of their ass, comedically) about what they would want to see in international internet relations and much as it relates to, well, everything else, what the 1% want is usually not all that nice for the 99%.