Abstract
Our research demonstrates that active abuse of cyberspace by virtually all groups of sanctions violators across many UN sanctions regimes has grown over the past almost 20 years. For almost as long, UN sanctions monitoring experts have formulated concrete examples and recommendations for how to address these expanding problems. The Security Council chose not to respond for much of this time, and when it finally did, in response to cyber space abuses by ISIL, it still did not answer with a comprehensive cyber sanctions policy. While more security in cyberspace is clearly in the public and private sectors' interest, leading governments equally clearly prefer their many secret intelligence programs that have come to light over the past years through leaks and other indiscretions. Fear of terrorism serves governments well in justifying countermeasures that undermine privacy rights in the name of enhancing public security. Procrastinating on adopting comprehensive sanctions solutions against cyber threats is likely connected with their preference for gaining control over advanced information technologies in order to weaponize them before multilateral agreements create restrictions.
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Notes
- 1.
Angola ’s war can be delineated by the war of independence, by the pre-election civil war for control of the political leadership, the third war over the election results, and finally the fourth war that UNITA commenced in 1997–1998 after a prolonged phase of mediation that Jonas Savimbi used to resupply and retrain his rebels.
- 2.
For an excellent account of Bout ’s story and capture, see, for example, Nicholas Schmidle in the New Yorker, Disarming Viktor Bout —The rise and fall of the world’s most notorious weapons trafficker. 5 March 2012 issue.
- 3.
For important research on the role of the Internet and the radicalization of some Somali groups see, for example, Ken Menkhaus,
2014. Al Shabaab and Social Media: A Double-Edged Sword. Brown Journal of World Affairs, Spring/Summer 2014, Volume xx, Issue II.
- 4.
- 5.
The public–private key encryption system is described in numerous academic works, but the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters, usually referred to by its acronym GHCQ has released a very short text on its website to take credit for its pioneering work: https://web.archive.org/web/20100519084635/http://www.gchq.gov.uk/history/pke.html.
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Carisch, E., Rickard-Martin, L., Meister, S.R. (2017). Emerging Threats and Sanctions: Abuses of Digital and Information Technologies. In: The Evolution of UN Sanctions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60005-5_9
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