The New Battlefield Is Online: Cybercrime, National Security, and the Limits of Law -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

In the 21st century battlefield, the traditional territories of tanks, missiles, artillery will no longer be seen. Its are servers and the lines of code connecting them are mostly hidden away in cyberspace for real to see. Now, cybercrime has turned cyberspace into a global battlefield. Criminals, hackers, intelligence agents, even governments all share the common field of electronic information operations with few clear rules. No one is subject to parliamentary oversight or any sort of discipline, and in some cases even judicature can become inefficient. The result is that today national security is increasingly threatened not by traditional war but by digital attacks that the legal system still does not understand, let alone can effectively control. The theft of credit card numbers by individual hackers is no longer the only type of cybercrime. The form it takes now is far more complex and subtle: there are extortion groups which specialize in ransomware attacks; and international fraud syndicates want only victims from rich countries with good insurance cover so they are unlikely to report the crime; countries engage in cyber espionage on other ones for a variety of motives including national interest or countering terrorists who could find shelter there; governmental hacking groups also invest their time trying to break into various systems world wide. Hospitals are closed down, elections manipulated or distorted, financial systems thrown into chaos and infrastructural plant destroyed without a single shot being fired. In this new type of war the damage is very real, the victims are also all too tangible but those who commit these acts often remain unseen.What makes cybercrime so insidiously dangerous is that it acts across borders but law enforcement is still within them. An attack might start in one country, pass through servers of several others, and reach its targets in lightning speed on another continent. But police officers, prosecutors and judges are still held back by a slow, archaic and disjointed system of mutual legal assistance treaties, diplomatic channels and jurisdictional rules designed for the pre digital world. By the time authorities identify who launched an attack, evidence has disappeared along with money up assets of foreign nationals stored in offshore banks while also disappearing into encrypted networks.

The gap between technological speed and lega1 response has created a world law enforcement vacuum. Criminals have realized the mistake and use it with precision. They know the chances of getting caught are small and extradited are even smaller, punishment much less again. Impunity rather than a rarity is the rule in cyberspace now. As for cyber security, this is a problem not only of law but also politics. Governments themselves are increasingly involved in cyber activities, including intelligence acquisition and surveillance. For activities may involve hacking, espionage or other aggressive actions in cyber warfare, when states engage this way they confuse crime with national security. Offensive cyber activity Vietnam brands as defense; China calls from Reval cyber aggression. While one nation upholds cyber powerful state another dismisses it as criminal operation. Without internationally recognized standards, the line between sorts of action which are permissible to be taken on Internet platforms and offensive moves made by terrorists becomes very subjective. International law has not kept up with this girl. The current group of laws were not written for a world in which a youth with a notebook can knock out enterprise, where cyber gangs can rake in billions, or where cyberspace operations are mounted in different countries and inveigle them into changing their politics without ever having crossed their borders at any time Attempts to create global agreements on cybercrime have been slow, fragmented and often handicapped by state political distrust. Some countries lay stress on security, others place emphasis sovereignty, and others are afraid that international cooperation may disclose their own real activities in the realm of cyber. Meanwhile, the victims increase in number. Businesses lose billions of dollars. Citizens lose their savings. Governments lose sensitive data. Hospitals lose the ability to provide life saving services. In many cases, the harm brought about by cyber crime is rivaling that of traditional attacks yet legal outcome remains small. This imbalance sends out a dangerous message: in a digital world, often might matters more than right.

The new risk is that the internet becomes a permanent zone of low intensity conflict a place where states probe, criminals can operate unchecked, and ordinary folk suffer. When international society is unable to construct more powerful legal frameworks, clearer rules of obligation, and swifter methods for collaboration, the globe will be in an era where digital insecurity is the new norm.If the law goes forward to a world wide web where people transform every aspect of their lives into an electronic hyperscul hich can be altered at any moment or reconstructed by reminding such things away, Tay be that for quite sometime to come it will be impossible for governments to understandattacks, it all stays up in Ltheyair. Until states decide that cybercrime, too, is a problem of national security and not one merely affecting technology, In public attention the advantage listen on the side of fail ures, people who exploit the system rather than those trying to uphold it.In the digital age, the greatest danger is not that cybercrime exists but that the world has yet to decide whether or not it really wants to fight.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia