Taylor Owen:

Acts of war have become spatially and conceptually boundless. The once legally and normatively established lines between war and peace and between domestic and international engagement are disappearing. This is leading us to a place of predictive governance, based on unaccountable and often unknowable algorithms. Increasingly tools and the algorithms that power them are being used to automate violence.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix:

The surveillance future is here, and it is not evenly distributed. Innovations in technology are fundamentally political, and our responses need to be political in turn.

Violet Blue:

Some suggest the new classifications seem designed to give the US a market advantage over the buying, selling, import and export of certain tools used in cyberwar -- a currently black market, in which the US government is already the biggest player.

These concerns, not surprisingly, are causing freakouts in nearly every corner of the information security sector.

If the goal is keeping the technologies of oppression out of the hands of despotic regimes, it's clear that Wassenaar and its distillation into BIS's new rules are primed to miss the mark in every way.