David E. Sanger

As we put autonomous cars on the road, connect Alexas to our lights and our thermostats, put ill-protected Internet-connected video cameras on our houses, and conduct our financial lives over our cell phones, our vulnerabilities expand exponentially. ”

The United States Cyber Command was created partly in response to a Russian hacking attack that long predated the 2016 election. ”

Once cyber crosses into the realm of the physical, then it's a physical attack, but it starts with cyber. And the idea of a cyber attack being able to take control of machines - that becomes a scary process. ”

There are certainly some secrets the government needs to protect, but many of the most important clues about revolutions, nuclear transfers, and new military sites can be found online, in open chat rooms and commercial satellite photos. ”

What the Russians did in the election in 2016 was clearly short of war, yet it was a pretty aggressive act to go into another country's voting system. ”

We have spent so much time worrying about a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,'' the attack that takes out the power grid, that we have focused far too little on the subtle manipulation of data that can mean that no election, medical record, or self-driving car can be truly trusted. ”

American officials sometimes dig into corporations because they are suspected to be witting or unwitting suppliers of technology to the North Koreans or the Iranians. ”

In the Chinese view, the United States has designed its own system of rules about what constitutes 'legal' spying and what is illegal. ”

In the old nuclear age, you could sit under a big screen under a mountain in Colorado, and you could see where the missiles were coming from. ”

Even China's leaders routinely let the news media pool in, though they do their best to ignore them. ”