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March 25-28, 2019
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Cyberconflict: A new era of war, sabotage, and fear

David Sanger (The New York Times)
9:40am10:00am Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Location: Ballroom
Secondary topics:  Security and Privacy
Average rating: ****.
(4.32, 50 ratings)

We’re living in a new era of constant sabotage, misinformation, and fear, in which everyone is a target, and you’re often the collateral damage in a growing conflict among states. From crippling infrastructure to sowing discord and doubt, cyber is now the weapon of choice for democracies, dictators, and terrorists.

David Sanger explains how the rise of cyberweapons has transformed geopolitics like nothing since the invention of the atomic bomb. Moving from the White House Situation Room to the dens of Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian hackers to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley, David reveals a world coming face-to-face with the perils of technological revolution—a conflict that the United States helped start when it began using cyberweapons against Iranian nuclear plants and North Korean missile launches. But now we find ourselves in a conflict we’re uncertain how to control, as our adversaries exploit vulnerabilities in our hyperconnected nation and we struggle to figure out how to deter these complex, short-of-war attacks.

Photo of David Sanger

David Sanger

The New York Times

David E. Sanger is the national security correspondent for the New York Times as well as a national security and political contributor for CNN and a frequent guest on CBS This Morning, Face the Nation, and many PBS shows. David’s years as a foreign correspondent have given him a unique view into the rise of Asia, nuclear proliferation, global competition, and a volatile Middle East. A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, including as a member of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning team in international reporting, he is one of the nation’s most lucid analysts of geopolitics, globalization, and cyberpower. He’s the author of national best-sellers Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power, a riveting analysis of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, including its covert reliance on cyberwarfare, drones, and special operations forces that Foreign Affairs called an “astonishingly revealing insider’s account,” and The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, an in-depth examination of American foreign policy successes and failures. His new book, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, offers an incisive look into how cyberwarfare is influencing elections, threatening national security, and bringing us to the brink of global war.

A 30-year veteran of the New York Times, Sanger’s coverage of the Iraq and Korea crises took home the Weintal Prize, one of the highest honors for diplomatic reporting. He also won the White House Correspondents’ Association Aldo Beckman prize for his presidential coverage.
Early in his career, Sanger covered technology and economics, before turning to foreign policy. Over the years, he has focused on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the rise and fall of Japan, and China’s increasing power and influence. Later, he covered domestic and foreign policy issues as the Times’s White House correspondent from 1999 to 2006. He’s a featured journalist in Alex Gibney’s 2016 docu-thriller Zero Days, based largely on his own investigation of the secret American and Israeli cyberprogram to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. David teaches national security policy as a visiting scholar and adjunct professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.