Digital Connectivity and Digital Informants in War

This is part of a series on “The Digital in War: From Innovation to Participation,” co-produced by Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program and Swedish Defense University.

Digital connectivity is reshaping the latent threat that civilian informants pose to armed forces in war. Smartphones and associated technologies currently enable any civilian to potentially pass verifiable target data to both local and distant forces almost instantaneously. Structurally, this should not be a surprise: technological change often enables new forms of individual or social action in war, sometimes with significant tactical or strategic implications. Some novel technologies therefore force a rethinking and reframing of the way war and warfare are evaluated in normative terms—the assumptions that underpinned previous understandings of right and wrong no longer seem to hold true in the present or near future.

Digital communications technologies, notably smartphones, have empowered civilian informants in conflict zones. Armed forces have historically had to deal with the fact that civilians may function as spies or pass information to opposing armed forces in an ad hoc manner.¹ However, today’s civilian observers to armed conflict likely have access to a smartphone that can transmit photos and videos, as well as GPS location data, in a near instantaneous manner.² This information can be utilized at a local level, enabling direct strikes upon an opposing force, and at an operational level, enabling one side to better understand the disposition of the other side.

Relatively small acts, such as taking a photo and uploading it to social media channels watched by combatants, can have significant consequences. This is because digital media lends itself to forms of communication that are distinctly more useful than spoken word communication. Today’s digital conflict observers can transmit trusted, timely, rich, and precise data that is inherently integrable into force decisions and kill chains.³ A combatant would not have to trust or rely upon an observer’s knowledge of military equipment to verify the model of a photographed armored fighting vehicle. Equally, photographic and video data can provide precise geolocation information that is impossible to capture in spoken communication.

The legal and moral understanding of civilian liability to harm in war is hard to reconcile with the nature of digital observers and informants in contemporary conflict.

As a consequence, digital connectivity has destabilized the concept of participation in war. The legal and moral understanding of civilian liability to harm in war is hard to reconcile with the nature of digital observers and informants in contemporary conflict and the threat that they can pose to combatants. Therefore, it is necessary to explain the problems this creates for armed forces in war and begin to explore areas of policy development and professional training to better equip them to address this issue in future conflicts.

This article highlights the challenges posed by general digital connectivity for states and their armed forces. It frames the issue in terms of how digital connectivity reshapes threats posed by civilian informants and identifies key policy problems, such as managing how armed forces interact with suspected digital informants, and the incentives states create for their citizens to collect information in armed conflicts.

Digital Informants as Empowered Observers

Digital connectivity changes the practicalities of civilian involvement in war. Specifically, smartphones and digital communications platforms increase the ability of civilians to collect data and information relevant to military operations and reduce the barriers to acting as a civilian informant to one (or more) sides in an armed conflict. A recognized key challenge of contemporary armed conflict is that civilians, in near real time, are able to communicate information that can be directly integrated into military targeting processes. This is in contrast to civilians making one-off, informal contributions or passing information that feeds into the planning of broader military operations, rather than specific attacks.⁴

Smartphones draw attention to the myriad forms of informational work that civilians can undertake in the context of war. Although researchers typically focus upon civilian involvement in terms of physical labor, such as firing weapons, civilian labor can also take the form of service provision or the production of intangible goods—observation and intelligence collection, information processing, and communication—that can equally help one side or the other in war. While there is a physical dimension to these roles and acts, their intangible nature makes their connection or contribution to armed conflict difficult to observe and measure.

Here, it is worthwhile to consider that some forms of what might be called information work have traditionally been recognized as significant issues in regulating war. Spying poses a grave threat to armed forces, so civilians found to be engaged in spying were and are liable to be treated extremely harshly if captured. In practical terms, there has always been a trade-off between the utility of punishing spies, collaborators, and informants and the legitimacy challenges associated with punishing them.⁵ Children and civilians often keep watch on military bases in expeditionary or counterinsurgency conflicts, and acting against them is likely counterproductive. In these kinds of conflicts, enraging a local population by detaining children suspected of being informants is unlikely to be worth the effort. International humanitarian law provides special and specific protection for children in armed conflict, which reflects general social intuitions that using force against them is qualitatively different from attacking adults.⁶

It is necessary, however, to distinguish between intelligence officers (spies) and their agents who feed them information or undertake actions at their behest. This second category might further be subdivided into collaborators—those who systematically work for, and collect information on behalf of, security forces—and informants—those who might provide information on an ad hoc basis.⁷ The reason for making such a distinction is that while both collaborators and informants have been prevalent in wars past and present, digital connectivity has empowered informants and increased the threat that they pose relative to intelligence officers and established networks of agents and collaborators.

The ability of average citizens to act as sources of timely, trusted, rich, and precise data is a consequence of digital connectivity. Equally important is that the barriers for individuals to engage with armed forces in war—in other words, moving from neutral civilians to civilian informants or collaborators—have also been greatly reduced by the same set of technologies. As a result, armed forces find themselves operating in an environment where the threat that civilian informants pose has been greatly increased, their opponents find it easier to trust the information provided by civilian informants, and it is far easier for any civilian with a smartphone to become a civilian informant.

Digital Participation in War

By empowering observers and civilian informants, digital connectivity is changing the practicalities of participating in war. The various uses of digital communications technologies by civilians have focused attention on the extent to which they alter civilian participation in war and, relatedly, the extent to which civilians are then liable to attack or cause harm.⁸ This is typically discussed in terms of distinguishing between indirect participation—acts and activities that civilians cannot be attacked or punished for committing—and direct participation—acts and activities that cause them to lose the protection of civilian status for some length of time.⁹

The problem of digital participation in war is compounded by the fact that the regulation of war primarily focuses on physical threats and harms. Information processing, and forms of work associated with the processing and communication of information (or intelligence) are lightly regulated in relative terms by the law of armed conflict and have only recently begun to be seriously studied in terms of just war theory.¹⁰ Whereas considerable effort has been expended considering the extent to which physical acts and labor roles might cause a civilian to be liable to attack,¹¹ less effort has been put into understanding intangible acts and activities, such as information communication and processing, despite their growing prevalence in contemporary warfare.

Intangible contributions to acts of violence have been recognized in some recent debates about international law. This was first notable in complicated debates about the relationship between cyber attacks and war, but the very nature of these contributions makes them harder to classify and categorize.¹² Many of the topics of analysis and points of debate regarding civilian participation in war are focused upon physical acts or roles requiring physical labor. In this sense, there is a notable bias toward analyzing civilian participation in war via physical work or exertion. When considering digital civilian informants, we must think beyond intangible methods of attack or disruption and instead consider how the traditional foregrounding of physical contributions to war limits our understanding of developing modes of intangible contributions to war that may enable larger scale harms than individual acts of violence.

Digital connectivity has expanded the range of ways in which civilians can observe and understand war, as well as forms of information work that can directly contribute to physical acts of harm. Considering what civilians can achieve in terms of information processing, it is hard to distinguish some forms of direct participation (such as providing data for targeting purposes) from the actions of civilians that normally would not be considered legitimate military targets. For example, if someone were to geolocate a military object from open data, publish this geolocation online, and this information was then used by combatants to target the military object, the main effort of the individual’s work—geolocation—would be no different to someone who undertook the same analysis but instead directly passed that information to combatants in the armed conflict.

Divergent Thresholds of Harm

The key challenge arising from digital participation in war is distinguishing between forms of digital participation that make an individual or organization liable to attack and harm and those that do not. The potentially outsized importance of otherwise minor actions, such as sharing a photo or a location tag, means that there is a growing tension between the latent threat that civilians pose to armed forces and the regulations that protect civilians in times of war. Civilians might once have aided armed forces by communicating information, but that information would not have much effect on a battlefield in the nineteenth century due to the nature of combat in that period. Conversely, forces operating in contemporary conflicts should now be keenly aware that any civilian with a smartphone could be communicating their exact position in real time to opposing forces.

An October 2023 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report recognized that digital participation can amount to direct participation in hostilities, therefore resulting in the loss of civilian protection.¹³ In addition, some legal scholars have noted that “civilian volunteers involved [in passing information to combatants] lose the essential protections against attacks and their effects that they would otherwise enjoy.”¹⁴ There are, however, two divergent approaches to the potential consequences of digital participation.

The first approach, which is taken by the ICRC and the wider humanitarian community, restates existing obligations to prevent civilian harm but also interprets the grounds on which a digital observer might be liable to harm in the most restrictive way possible.¹⁵ At extremes, this can take the form of arguing that a civilian uploading targeting information to an opposing force is liable to be attacked only when that information is directly used for an attack and, even then, only during the second or so that it takes to send the information. This approach, while it might make sense in theoretical terms, perhaps ignores the fact that it is entirely impracticable in the real world. Given that combatants would not know the exact sequencing of information processing by their opponents (whether the information is used directly or processed in some form to create an intelligence product that might also adversely affect them), nor would they realistically be able to time an attack for a button press, the restrictive interpretation of digital participation effectively insulates civilians from attack, even if they are directly aiding attacks in an armed conflict.

A second approach that includes a more expansive interpretation of liability to attack is equally troubling. If civilians acting as direct observers might be targetable, what about civilians performing tasks like geolocation on open-source data? Geolocation can produce intelligence products that are even more useful for the purposes of an attack than the location of a single tank. Open-source intelligence (OSINT) researchers regularly study the location of strategic facilities, such as those associated with North Korea’s nuclear program, and can geolocate operational targets such as military bases. In this regard, the potential expansion of liability to attack and harm implied by civilian uses of digital technologies is enormous.

Digital connectivity poses a problem for states seeking to wage war effectively while also minimizing civilian harm.

Consequently, digital connectivity poses a problem for states seeking to wage war effectively while also minimizing civilian harm. One way of understanding digital connectivity’s effects is that it has reduced the scope for optimum policy and practice that balances the risks to civilian populations against the security of armed forces in the field. States can make policy choices on who, or what, they consider to be liable to harm for information collection and processing in war, but on a theoretical level it is hard to justify a principle that reasonably includes digital informants without over-including a huge range of civilians with access to the internet. This problem is likely to become even more salient as such distinctions are coded into artificial intelligence (AI) systems used to distinguish and identify targets in contemporary and future wars.¹⁶

The Need for Policy Responses

How should states respond to the challenge digital informants pose to society’s understanding of participation and restraint in war? This section highlights two key areas where states may need to work on developing policy responses to digital informants. The primary problem is the interaction of armed forces with civilian populations. Since digital connectivity means civilians can enable ambushes and indirect fire, or provide live tracking information on forces, it greatly increases the latent threat that informants pose to armed forces.

The first policy area that needs consideration is how to manage armed forces’ responses to digital informants in this new environment given that they have been trained to treat the civilian population as bystanders. Notwithstanding criminal responses (for instance, shooting at civilians indiscriminately or arbitrarily executing civilians found to be passing information to opposing forces),¹⁷ digital connectivity has raised the latent threat that individual civilians pose to soldiers; they must now operate in an environment where any civilian’s smartphone could be helping someone target them for attack.

Without an appropriate organizational response in terms of developing standards and procedures, as well as training for such situations, individual combatants are likely to respond in an ad hoc manner.

Without an appropriate organizational response in terms of developing standards and procedures, as well as training for such situations, individual combatants are likely to respond in an ad hoc manner. This means that an armed force risks losing control of its own personnel in these situations or seeing varied regimes of interaction between its forces and civilian populations depending upon units and locations. It is therefore necessary to think about how an armed force might develop policy and training to standardize, as much as is possible, the way its troops respond to these kinds of situations.

A second policy area is the way in which states collect information from civilian populations during armed conflict and the extent to which that undermines the ability of their civilians to remain neutral (or, at best, indirect participants). As outlined above, there is a need to consider the intangible contributions to war in terms of direct participation and the novel dimension of publishing and communicating information relevant to targeting in war. For states, this adds to the complexities of ensuring civilian protection during armed conflict, an area that already lacks universal interpretations.¹⁸

In the Russian war against Ukraine, for example, the Ukrainian government has integrated tools for reporting Russian forces into its generalized government digital services platform.¹⁹ The central dilemma here is that states gain an obvious advantage from integrating civilian-produced data into intelligence systems, but doing so makes it hard for civilians to remain neutral. What this points to is the need to evaluate the design of communication systems and digital platforms in ethical terms. For example, if a government makes an app that enables civilians to pass information to its armed forces, use of that app might be considered relevant when determining an individual’s connection to armed conflict. Equally, if a government integrates reporting mechanisms into general digital services, to the extent that citizens are unable to access other government digital services without also having access to a reporting function, this makes it difficult for civilians to stay neutral in armed conflict.

The value of this approach is that it enables academics to conceptualize the stakes for preserving civilian neutrality in digital services and platforms. This, in turn, may help governments negotiate agreements on how to design government digital services in a way that enables the preservation of civilian neutrality in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion

The past twenty-five years have seen overlapping waves of digital connectivity—the internet, then platforms, and then smartphones—spread throughout the world, including into every conflict zone in some form or another. This trend necessitates a rethinking of how intangible contributions to armed conflict may render civilians liable to attack or increase the likelihood of armed forces committing war crimes in response to digital informants. 

The two policy areas highlighted in this article—addressing the way armed forces are trained to deal with digital informants, and evaluating the incentives states create for their citizens to become digital informants in armed conflicts—are the most salient of the issues associated with this topic. In the future, it is unlikely that a perfect solution or set of standards will develop in response to these issues, but states should focus on these issues now before divergent responses create problems in coalition warfighting or peacekeeping operations.