The British Army launched its controversial new recruitment campaign  targeting the MySpace generation and exploiting teenage boys' love of violent computer games. In May as part of a push to entice new young recruits, the Ministry of Defence  developed a giant computer simulator designed to recreate adrenaline-fuelled overseas missions.

The simulated campaigns - entitled Start Thinking Soldier - concentrates on the hands-on operations based in Afghanistan and Iraq. For three days this month, MoD recruiters hostig an army careers exhibition where potential recruits will enter a simulator, wearing goggles and using omputerised weapons, and have to navigate their way through a range of combat scenarios and shoot- outs.

The equipment features at a series of events across the UK but will be used for the first time (like poll tax) in Glasgow's Bellahouston Park, and runs alongside young soldiers talking about their army experiences. The event, open to the public allows local school groups to try out the Laser Quest-style game.

No game as US and Russia dispute solutions
The US and Russia, report John Markoff  and Andrew Kramer however are locked in a more serious fundamental dispute over how to counter the growing threat of cyberwar attacks, that could wreak havoc on computer systems and the Internet alike.

Both nations agree that cyberspace is an emerging battleground. The two sides are expected to address the subject when President Obama visits Russia next week and at the General Assembly of the United Nations in November, according to a senior State Department official. But there the agreement ends.

Treating IT like chemical weapons
Russia favors an international treaty along the lines of those negotiated for chemical weapons and has pushed for that approach at a series of meetings this year and in public statements by a high-ranking official.

The US  argues that a treaty is unnecessary. It advocates improved cooperation among international law enforcement groups. If these groups cooperate to make cyberspace more secure against criminal intrusions, their work will also make cyberspace more secure against military campaigns.

“We really believe it’s defense, defense, defense,” said the State Department official. “They want to constrain offense. We needed to be able to criminalise these horrible 50,000 attacks we were getting a day.”

Any agreement on cyberspace presents special difficulties because the matter touches on issues like censorship of the Internet, sovereignty and rogue player not be subject to a treaty.

The impact of Cyber War
US  officials say  disagreement over approach has hindered international law enforcement cooperation,  given that a significant proportion of the attacks against American government targets are coming from China and Russia. From the Russian perspective, the absence of a treaty is permitting a kind of arms race with potentially dangerous consequences.

Officials around the world recognise the need to deal with the growing threat of cyberwar. Many countries, including the US, are developing weapons for it, like “logic bombs” that can be hidden in computers to halt them at crucial times or damage circuitry; “botnets” that can disable or spy on Web sites and networks; or microwave radiation devices that can burn out computer circuits miles away.

Pentagon is planning to create a military command to prepare for both defense and offensive computer warfare. President Obama in his cybersecurity strategy, is to appoint a “cybersecurity coordinator” to lead efforts to protect government computers, the air traffic control system and essential systems and also emphasises the benefits of building international cooperation.

Russian and American approaches, by treaty and by law enforcement agreement, are not necessarily incompatible, but do represent different philosophical approaches.

Vladislav P. Sherstyuk, a deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, a powerful body advising the president on national security, has laid out what he described as Russia’s bedrock positions on disarmament in cyberspace. Russia’s proposed treaty would ban a country from secretly embedding malicious codes or circuitry that could be later activated from afar in the event of war.

Other suggested solutions
Other proposals include the application of humanitarian laws banning attacks on noncombatants and a ban on deception in operations in cyberspace, an attempt to deal with the challenge of anonymous attacks. The Russians have also called for broader international government oversight of the Internet.

US officials are particularly resistant to agreements allowing governments to censor the Internet, as providing cover for totalitarian regimes. They worry that a treaty would be ineffective because it can be almost impossible to determine if an Internet attack originated from a government, a hacker loyal to that government, or a rogue acting independently.

The unique challenge of cyberspace is that governments can carry out deceptive attacks to which they cannot be linked, says Herbert Lin, director of a study by the National Research Council, a private, nonprofit organisation, on the development of cyberweapons.

This challenge became apparent in 2001, after a Navy P-3 surveillance plane collided with a Chinese fighter plane, said Linton Wells II, a former high-ranking Pentagon official who now teaches at the National Defense University. The collision was followed by a huge increase in attacks on US government computer targets from sources that could not be identified, he said.

Similarly, after computer attacks in Estonia in April 2007 and in the nation of Georgia last August, the Russian government denied involvement and independent observers said the attacks could have been carried out by nationalist sympathizers or by criminal gangs.

The decision to move the war statue (left) from the Talinn city center to a military cemetery enraged Russia and Russian Estonians and was promptly followed by a crippling, month long siege of Estonian computer networks.

The US is trying to improve cybersecurity by building relationships witih international law enforcement agencies. State Department officials hold as a model Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, in 2004, signed by 22 nations, including the US, but not Russia or China.

But Russia objects that the European convention  allows the police to open investigation of suspected online crime originating in another country without first informing local authorities, infringing traditional ideas of sovereignty. Vladimir V. Sokolov, deputy director of the Institute for Information Security Issues, a policy organisation, notes Russian authorities routinely cooperated with foreign police organisations when approached.

This is not the first time the issue of arms control for cyberspace has been raised. In 1996, at the dawn of commercial cyberspace, US and Russian military delegations met secretly in Moscow to discuss the subject, US  led by an academic military strategist, and Russia by a four-star admiral. No agreement resulted.

Later, the Russian government repeatedly introduced resolutions calling for cyberspace disarmament treaties before the United Nations. Consistently the US opposed the idea. In late April, Russian military representatives indicated interest in renewed negotiations at a Russian-sponsored meeting on computer security in Garmisch, Germany.

John Arquilla, a military strategy expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif, who led the American delegation at the 1996 talks, said he had received almost no interest from within US  military after those initial meetings. “It was a great opportunity lost,” he said.

Unlike US officials who favor tighter law enforcement relationships, Arquilla believes in cyberspace weapons negotiations. He noted that treaties on chemical weapons had persuaded many nations not to make or stockpile such weapons.

The US and China have not held high-level talks on cyberwar issues, specialists say. But there is evidence that the Chinese are being courted by Russia for support of an arms control treaty for cyberspace.

“China .. consistently attached extreme importance to matters of information security, and always actively supported and participated in efforts by the international community dedicated to maintaining Internet safety and cracking down on criminal cyber-activity,” Qin Gang, Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement.

Whether the US or Russian or another approach prevails, arms control experts say, major governments are reaching a point of no return in heading off a cyberwar arms race.