Establishing Cyberspace Sovereignty

Abstract

International norms governing appropriate conduct in cyberspace are immature, leaving politicians, diplomats, and military authorities to grapple with the challenges of defending against and executing hostilities in cyberspace. Cyberspace is unlike the traditional physical domains where actions occur at specific geographic places and times. Rules governing conduct in the traditional domains emerged over centuries and share a common understanding of sovereignty that helps establish and justify the use of force. In cyberspace, sovereignty is a more abstract notion because the geographic boundaries are often difficult to define as data and applications increasingly reside in a virtual, global “cloud.” This paper proposes a construct for establishing sovereignty in cyberspace by studying similarities between space and cyberspace. The characteristics of the space domain challenged traditional notions of sovereignty based on geography. As nations deployed space-based capabilities, the concept of sovereignty needed to mature to deal with the physical realities of space. Sovereignty is defined, and general requirements for claiming sovereignty are presented. The evolution of sovereignty in space is then discussed, followed by a construct for how sovereignty could be defined in cyberspace. The paper also reviews U.S. civil policy and military doctrine and discusses how these documents offer insights into the U.S. approach to asserting its claims within these domains. It concludes by examining an emerging trend where nations not only seek to establish sovereign claims over the architectural aspects of cyberspace, but also the information that flows over it.