What’s a proportional response to a cyberattack?
The conventional wisdom says that there isn’t much left that the U.S. can do to punish North Korea for its alleged cyber attack on Sony Pictures.
A cyber attack doesn’t immediately seem like a matter of national security. It’s not like an attack on the banking system or on a defense contractor.
But it’s the principle of the thing. Companies are already self-censoring, like Paramount canceling rereleases of its 2004 film “Team America.” Michael Auslin, a scholar in residence at the American Enterprise Institute, says “many companies that would not want to self censor, or not want to cave in to these types of threats are nonetheless looking at their cyber vulnerabilities and having to make to be quite honest a cost-benefit analysis.”
But there are some national security concerns, according to Stephen Bosworth, a fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center.
“The problem, of course, is if they can do it with this case, there’s every reason to fear they can do it in an area that would be much more sensitivity,” Bosworth says.
North Korea doesn’t have much of an economy to sanction, but Sung Yoon Lee, professor of Korean Studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, says there are some things America can do. The U.S. could place North Korea on the State Department’s sponsor of terrorism list, or blacklist North Koreans responsible for censorship or Human Rights Abuses. There’s also the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, which could result in boycotts of North Korea’s trading partners.
That bill passed the house in July of this year but wasn’t taken up by the Senate.
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