IGF2012 Workshop: Open Forum Council of Europe: Terrorism, the Internet and Human Rights

OII Professor Ian Brown discusses how to prevent misuse of the Internet for purposes of terrorism at the 2012 Internet Governance Forum conference in Azerbaijan. Brown states that necessity and proportionality are essential parts of the European Convention on Human Rights and argues in this vein that policymakers and politicians must precisely define terms such as ‘cyberterrorism’ and ‘cyberwarfare’. He further declares that no evidence exists to link one particular cyberincident involving Russian actions in Estonia to either of the two phenomena. Brown concludes by remarking that the idea of attacking nuclear power stations through cyberterrorism is unrealistic since it would constitute a “catastrophic” failure of engineering if these would be accessible through the public internet.