IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2016 - 84

plans, ideas, allocations, and plans in plain speech
either as phone conversations, emails, shared documents, or text messages. The abundance of digital information is a new phenomenon in totalitarian states.

Limitations of Traditional Responsibility
to Protect
The high threshold for taking international or unilateral
action to according to the obligations to act according
to principles of responsibility to protect, is that the
action traditionally assumes conventional military
intervention. The compliance enforcement of humanitarian law, driven by the intellectual lineage and precedence started in the UN charter of 1945, is intervention
utilizing military assets. A repressive nation such as
DPRK can, by having a bellicose posture, threaten significant escalation to prevent interference in domestic
affairs, and by doing so avoid interference, even if the
DPRK regime behind the scenes conducts crimes
against humanity [7]. If launched, international military
humanitarian operations would then automatically turn
into to a full-scale conventional war on the Korean peninsula. The DPRK's aggressive stance allows that
repressive state to continue human rights abuses without any intervention.
Over the past decade, as the concept of responsibility
to protect has developed in the U.N. among international
organizations and non-governmental organizations, a
concept of a "moral obligation to act" has surfaced [8].
The international community, and major powers, cannot
silently watch crimes against humanity be perpetrated.
There is a moral obligation to act. This is feasible in
nations with little military resistance to a humanitarian
intervention, such as Rwanda and Sierra Leone. DPRK
can mobilize millions of troops. The majority use obsolete equipment, but they are likely to fight hard as a
result of decades of propaganda and indoctrination.
A relevant question is, then, whether DPRK can nullify responsibility to protect by their confrontational posture. If that is the case, the worst perpetrator wins. This
was already witnessed in the Soviet Stalin terror during
the 1920 and 1930s, where accessible documentation
afterwards is almost non-existent, the witnesses were to
a high degree themselves victims and executed later,
and knowledge of these crimes disappeared over time.
Historians can estimate the number of killed by the
Soviet terror with a granularity of million victims [9], but
very few actual perpetrators can be identified and
linked to their actual actions.

Launching Humanitarian Cyber Operations
Humanitarian cyber operations can play a role in enforcing international humanitarian law and create access to
the secret domains of repressive regimes.

Humanitarian cyber operations are launched under
obligations within responsibility to protect, aligned with
the United Nations' framework for intercepting and acting to prevent crimes against humanity. The state that
utilizes humanitarian cyber operations towards another
state declares openly that the state is initiating humanitarian cyber operations in the country of concern.
The open initiation of the humanitarian cyber operations is aligned with responsibility to protect. This avoids
having the upcoming events being seen as acts of war,
and avoids triggering a just and supported-by-international-law declaration of war by the targeted state.
Humanitarian cyber operations will then be allowed
by international law to penetrate the information systems and communication channels of the targeted
nation in the pursuit of information that will either confirm or deny that crimes against humanity are occurring
within the targeted state. The length and size of the
cyber operations is dependent on the initial concern. If
a regime systematically, and in defiance of human
rights, abuses its population, then the established
humanitarian cyber operations continue operating as
long as there is a verified concern.
If a country, known for its systematic human rights
violations, find itself having humanitarian cyber operations launched against its regime by several major
democracies in the international community, the targeted country can appeal in the United Nations.
Humanitarian cyber operations are not a carte blanche to conduct offensive cyber operations. Rather they
follow the mechanisms of conventional military intervention in failing countries and systematic human
rights violation.
There are several benefits of humanitarian cyber
operations:
1) Rapid deployment compared to traditional intervention. Cyber operations can be launched within weeks
compared to months, generating an ability to quickly
gather information.
2) The legal framework is already established in responsibility to protect, Humanitarian cyber operations is
another vehicle to reach the intended results.
3) Humanitarian cyber operations limit the advantage
that bellicose repressive states receive by having
aggressive postures, because these states can not
control their digital footprint.
4) Humanitarian cyber operation can be exclusively utilized by functional democracies that respect human
rights to protect human life and welfare in repressive
states, the repressive states cannot counterstrike at
the same level because that might be an act of war,
with embedded repercussions.
5) There is no kinetic effect or additional violence, such
as a bombing campaign, to soften a repressive regime

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september 2016

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