Complexity of International Law for Cyber Operations

Abstract

Policy documents are usually written in text form—word after word, sentence after sentence, page after page, section after section, chapter after chapter—which often masks some of their most critical features. The text form cannot easily show interconnections among elements, identify the relative salience of issues, or represent feedback dynamics, for example. These are “hidden” features that are difficult to situate. This paper presents a computational analysis of Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations, a seminal work in International Law. Tallinn Manual 2.0 is a seminal document for many reasons, including but not limited to, its (a) authoritative focus on cyber operations, (b) foundation in the fundamental legal principles of the international order and (c) direct relevance to theory, practice, and policy in international relations. The results identify the overwhelming dominance of specific Rules, the centrality of select Rules, the Rules with autonomous standing (that is, not connected to the rest of the corpus), and highlight different aspects of Tallinn Manual 2.0, notably situating authority, security of information -- the feedback structure that keeps the pieces together. This study serves as a “proof of concept” for the use of computational logics to enhance our understanding of policy documents.