The Department of Defense is looking to expand its partnerships in cyberspace, looking beyond its traditional treaty allies, said Steven Schleien, the department principal director for cyber policy.
Schleien spoke at Georgetown University’s second annual International Engagement on Cyber where experts from Washington, the Netherlands and Russia spoke about national security and diplomatic efforts in cyberspace before several hundred students and experts in the field.
“We started with our traditional treaty allies, those with whom we have commitments,” Schleien said.
Defense officials worked with DOD allies and NATO staff during the 2010 Lisbon Summit, Schleien said, to bring all NATO networks, civilian and military, under the NATO Cyber Incident Response Center, which is expected to be complete later this year.
Most recently, he said, DOD officials are starting to talk with the Japanese, South Korean and New Zealand defense ministries about cybersecurity, while working closely with the British and Australian ministries “to talk about a whole spectrum of cyber interoperability.”
Internationally, though, “we do believe that we need to establish norms of international behavior for cyberspace,” he added.
“The law of armed conflict comes to mind as one that’s essential to DOD,” Schleien said, “because in our view, [it] applies to cyberspace as it does to the other operational domains.”
