Updating the Wassenaar debate once again: Surveillance, intrusion software, and ambiguity

Abstract

This paper analyzes a recent debate on regulating cyber weapons through multilateral export controls. The background relates to the amending of the international Wassenaar Arrangement with offensive cyber security technologies known as intrusion software. Implicitly, such software is related to previously unregulated software vulnerabilities and exploits, which also make the ongoing debate particularly relevant. By placing the debate into a historical context, the paper reveals interesting historical parallels, elaborates the political background, and underlines many ambiguity problems related to rigorous definitions for cyber weapons. Many difficult problems remaining for framing offensive security tools with multilateral export controls are also pointed out.

Recent Trends in Cross-Border Data Access by Law Enforcement Agencies

“…The challenges for law enforcement agencies are well-known (Casino et al, 2022;Ryder & Le-Khac, 2016). To tackle the challenges, LEAs and intelligence agencies in some countries have turned toward so-called offensive security and government hacking; the use of exploits to compromise services and devices, the remote installation of malware, and other opaque, less accountable, and controversial means of accessing data and tackling cyber crime (Bellovin, Blaze, & Landau, 2016;Brown, 2020;Daskal, 2016;Koops & Kosta, 2018;Ruohonen & Kimppa, 2019). Some other countries, including Australia in particular, have introduced specific but controversial anti-encryption laws (McGarrity & Hardy, 2020).…”

Mapping Terrorism and Policy: Reshaping U.S. Foreign Policy towards War on Terror 2001-2010

“…It is due to the spread of international terrorism that many nations were willing to form a coalition with the U.S. Even nations that have never seen eye to eye with the U.S. on matters politics joined the U.S. to condemn acts of terrorism; this, of course, is Russia and China (Ruohonen & Kimppa, 2019) & (Muzaffar, et. al.…”

“…Looking back at the events that led to the 9/11 attacks, a lot of it is tied to Al-Qaeda, and the financial aid Osama Bin Laden provided to many terror cells across the world. To crush the growth of these acts, the U.S. focused on financial control and economic sanctions within the Foreign Policy between 2001 and 2010 (Ruohonen & Kimppa, 2019). The first action the United States enacted was to block the movement and owned property of the state that was suspected to be housing, aiding or sponsoring terrorist activities.…”

“…A list of such properties and materials includes funds, charities, any services, financial opportunities, technologies, software, and any import or export activities to the State were blocked. These policies and sanctions have been enacted the hardest on Afghanistan and the Taliban Regime except for medicine, medical equipment, and agricultural items (Ruohonen & Kimppa, 2019).…”

An Acid Test for Europeanization: Public Cyber Security Procurement in the European Union

“…This offensive side is important already because investments to cyber security have partially and paradoxically increased also cyber insecurity. Also the recent international efforts to regulate the offensive side of cyber (in)security through multilateral venues have faced problems (Ruohonen and Kimppa 2019;Stevens 2017). The same could be said about traditional multilateral venues in general;…”