This past weekend, U.S. intelligence agencies released a report asserting that the Russian government hacked into email servers belonging to the Democratic National Committee, in what the Office of the Director of National Intelligence called a “campaign to influence the election.”

The cyberattacks on an American target marked what some commentators called an “unprecedented” intrusion into the American political system, underscoring the threat of cyberwarfare and its effects. Daniel Abebe, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School explores how these kinds of state-to-state exchanges could be regulated—how the United States government might choose to curtail, or expand, the President’s authority to engage in cyberwarfare—in light of cyberwarfare’s nascent, but increasingly important status within the international community.

In his forthcoming paper, Abebe argues that in determining the appropriate level of control for cyberwarfare—a new type of conflict that could challenge existing norms of conventional warfare—policymakers must consider not only internal institutional constraints, such as the U.S. Constitution, but also the direct relationship these internal constraints have with external constraints created by the competing interests and cyber capabilities of other countries.

Read more at RegBlog