UK Eyes New Laws Over Cable Sabotage
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Cyberattacks and undersea cable sabotage are blurring the line between war and peace and exposing holes in UK law, a government minister has warned lawmakers.
Earlier this year, the UK government published a Strategic Defence Review, which proposes a new bill to cover the prospect of state-sponsored cybercrime and subsea cable attacks.
In January, Sweden committed forces to the Baltic Sea following a suspected Russian attack on underwater data cables, one of a number of incidents.
Speaking to the National Security Strategy (Joint Committee) yesterday, Ministry of Defence parliamentary under-secretary Luke Pollard admitted that the Submarine Telegraph Act 1885 - which can impose 1,000 fines - "does seem somewhat out of step with the modern-day risk."
However, he pointed out that forming legislation to mitigate the risk to undersea infrastructure is a balance between a civil and military approach, but this raises the question of how the government might prosecute a perpetrator of undersea cable sabotage.
"We've identified that this is an area that could be looked at again. That's why the Strategic Defence Review talked about creating a defence readiness bill, probably in a later stage, a later session of parliament," he said.
"The legislation that we have inherited may be operational for a peacetime scenario, but they don't necessarily always lead up until crisis into conflict. Between peacetime and conflict, those two good sets of legislation that exist in our system; the build-up between the two perhaps less so."
Pollard pointed to so-called "gray zone threats," hostile activities that sit below the definition of armed conflict.
"It is legitimate to have a question about at what point is someone at war, because on a simple article five of the NATO Treaty basis, if Russia were to roll tanks into the Baltic states, it would be reasonable for the Atlantic council then to take a position that that is an attack on one as an attack on all, [but] where there are cyberattacks and potential threats to undersea infrastructure, the moment where you might move from peace to conflict might be less certain, and because of that, we've identified that as an area where it is prudent to undertake more work, both in terms of how the UK would respond, to how do we update our activities around our reserve forces and other aspects."
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