11 Principles for the Brewing Cyber Wars

As thousands joined in the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Mastercard et al., the first full-scale cyber war (or “Internet War“) had begun. I have already expressed my concern (here and here) that the boycotters of Amazon hadn’t provided a compelling justification for their strategy. In the present article, I’ll offer some general observations that I hope will help libertarians and antiwar activists to organize their thoughts as the conflict escalates.

Amazon, MasterCard, et al. have not been torturing prisoners or bombing civilians; the U.S. government has. At best, these companies capitulated to very real threats from the government, and at worst they cut a deal to remove an earlier threat that had been hanging over them. I personally cannot judge them too harshly, since I may very well have done the same (though I would have needed to be waterboarded before issuing the press release that Amazon gave). Now I understand that some very committed antiwar activists would have gone to jail under similar circumstances, but they are in the minority. It is one thing to say you will stand up to the government; it’s something else entirely when an actual senator is on the phone.
A silly Star Wars analogy may help: The boycotters presumably liken Amazon to Lando Calrissian, who sold out his friend Han Solo in a deal with the Empire. But this isn’t at all accurate. Amazon didn’t deliver Assange over to the authorities; his jilted lovers did. Amazon’s “betrayal” merely meant that the WikiLeaks site was down for a few hours, and all Amazon did was end its business relationship with the pariah organization. It would be as if the Millennium Falcon needed to refuel, and the first planet they stopped at told them to keep moving because they were on Vader’s blacklist. Now if that had happened in the movie, and then after hitting the next depot (three hours away) the rebels circled back and starting firing on the first place for not selling them fuel, the audience would have been quite perplexed. That’s not what the good guys do. The good guys study the schematics of the Death Star; they don’t figure out which groups of non-combatants they should punish next for not joining the rebellion.

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