Members of Congress have proposed issuing letters of marque and reprisal - an 18th-century legal instrument once used to authorize privateers - to private American hackers, tasking them with seizing cryptocurrency stolen by foreign cybercriminals who are already subject to U.S. sanctions.
Peter E. Harrell, a former senior director at the National Security Council, has described the proposal as part of a broader and largely unexamined expansion of American hybrid economic warfare into the cyber domain, writing in Foreign Affairs, "Hvylya" reports.
The proposal exposes an unresolved problem. Hundreds of cybercriminal groups are subject to U.S. sanctions, but actually recovering stolen digital assets held abroad raises legal questions Washington has not yet answered - including whether the United States has the right to use cyber methods to recover sanctioned property from foreign jurisdictions.
Harrell noted the contradiction at the heart of America's evolving posture. The United States has spent more than a decade building international support for norms against cyberattacks on commercial targets and critical infrastructure. After North Korea hacked Sony Pictures in 2014, the Obama administration imposed sanctions in retaliation and pushed for global rules to protect the commercial domain from state-sponsored cyber operations.
Now, by embracing both naval seizures and potential cyber operations to enforce sanctions, Washington appears ready to abandon the constraints it once championed. "Iran, Russia, and Venezuela can't sell oil to China if the tankers can't get there," Harrell wrote - but the same logic now extends to digital assets, where the boundaries of U.S. jurisdiction are far less clear.
Without a formal doctrine of economic statecraft - a set of principles governing when the United States will use military or cyber force to back up sanctions - Harrell argued that the coming months will likely bring expanded hybrid operations "with little sense of where it might be headed." Also read how China's economic espionage has grown to dwarf anything pre-World War I Germany achieved.