Cornell Law School student Stephen E. White wrote a paper in the Cornell International Law Journal about the legalities of neurowarfare. White told me he’s interested in “examining the legality of some of the weapon systems that DARPA is developing and how the use of brain-machine interfaces may challenge many of the core principles of domestic and international criminal law.” From the paper:
For the past several years, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA), the military research and development agency tasked
with maintaining U.S. military technological superiority, has engaged in
research on direct neurological control of weapon systems.1 Although
international law does not create a per se prohibition on the use of these
weapons, the potential misuse of such weapons radically challenges tradi-
tional notions of criminal responsibility by effacing the distinction between
thought and act. This Note suggests that the development of such weap-
ons requires a more expansive doctrine of command responsibility in order
not to vitiate established legal principles regarding criminal accountability
for war crimes.
Link (to PDF)