Well, at just shy of 32 years old, there has yet to be a single year of my life free of official conflicts or wars. In fact, even my 52-year-old father has not experienced a year of his life free from official conflict or war in effect. If you're older than him, perhaps you've experienced a non-wartime state, but you'd pretty much have to be older than my grandfather.

This document isn't talking about there being conflict just anywhere in the world, but about the actors involved within the states that are officially engaged in open hostilities--i.e., if there is conflict between China and Taiwan, it's not okay for Pakistan to retaliate with conventional force against a group of hackers in India. At least, that's how it reads to me at the moment.

Also, I wasn't saying it was okay. I was pointing out that the posted article is sensationalized, misleading, and misrepresenting the information to get page views--while adding some actual context and content the article completely left out or presented incorrectly. And I wanted to draw an historical analogue to something I thought many people would know about that could be accomplished by hackers today, potentially falling under the purview of this new NATO guidance.

[edit: I learned to code in 5th/6th grade. sorry to leave that out.]

The US is not a 'wartime state'. It's been committed to business as usual, and if you never bothered reading the news, you could get away with never knowing it was at war for the most part. No rationing or real shortages, no conscription, no opposing forces tromping over the nation, no aerial attacks. The US is technically at war, but its society isn't - if you don't want to sacrifice anything for your country, you can go about your business quite happily and undisturbed.

This is exactly the point. The government has repeatedly used the legal fiction of the United States being "at war" to dramatically expand its punitive authority, despite the fact that the "war" is an open-ended, amorphous legal fiction. That's why it is so dangerous to dismiss some extraordinary assertion of power because it only applies "in wartime"; it's always wartime, even when it's not.