INSTRUMENTAL CORRECTIONS FOR A DEFINITION OF CYBERWAR - Cyberwar-Netwar: Security in the Information Age - page 7

revolution may alter the nature of conflict short of war, as well as the context and the
conduct of warfare.” 4, 11
“The target of netwar is the human mind” - George Stein echoes these words and
evolves his theory further: this media-created universe is dubbed 'fictive' rather than
'fictional' because while what is shown may be true, it is just not the whole, relevant, or
contextual truth and, of course, the close etymological relationship between fictive and
fictional suggests how easy it is to manipulate the message. Nevertheless, this fictive
universe becomes the politically relevant universe in societies in which the government
or its military is supposed to do something 12 .
In general, all of these arguments are true, but, indeed, in general, because today there
are a lot of cyberwar-oriented ICT and systems, but we still do not know what is allowed,
and what must be prohibited. That is why the opinion arises that, most likely, the sources
of netwars can be collisions into social, ethnic, religious and ideological grounds.
Obviously, at least for the authors, any international law cannot eliminate these eternal
collisions; only time can do so.
In this sense we have to cardinally separate cyberwars from netwars and to examine
cyberwar as a form of state politics, which can be discussed and adjusted by
international law. In this connection, all information systems of economy, systems for
electronic learning and professional training, knowledge management systems and,
certainly, all components of an adversary information infrastructure can be considered as
cybertargets (and most likely will become cybertargets, at least as sources for intelligence
service agencies).
There is a very important definition of the IW by the 'Joint Publication 3-13' 2 , where
the IW is defined as “any form of information operations conducted during time of crisis
or conflict to achieve or promote specific objectives over a specific adversary or
adversaries”. It is necessary to separate cyberwar from IW and, in this direction, we have
to refer to 13 , where the authors offer a convincing classification of a cyberwar that we
consider as the basis for our reasoning:
x Cyberwar as an adjunct to military operations (a key objective is information
superiority)
x Limited cyberwar (the information infrastructure is the medium, target and
weapon of attack)
x Unrestricted cyberwar (there are no distinctions between military and civilian
targets)
3. DEFINITIONS
Note that all of the definitions used have reference to a few basic definitions. As
without these definitions a rippled severity of next reasoning can disappear, we have to
catalogue them in full.
x Information operations (IO): actions taken to affect adversary information and
information systems while defending one's own information and information
systems 3 .
x Information Superiority: the capability to collect, process, and disseminate an
uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or denying an adversary's
ability to do the same. Information superiority is achieved in a non-combat