[D]avid E. Sanger is an author and national security correspondent for the New York Times. In a live interview with VTDigger editor Anne Galloway in Manchester last week, he said that the integrity of the 2020 election will largely depend on whether the U.S. can defend itself from cyber attacks.
Foreign interference in the 2016 elections should not have been a surprise after Russia’s behavior towards Ukraine in the years leading up, Sanger said. “We were so out to lunch that…we didn’t have the imagination to think that what the Russians were doing in Ukraine that they would dare to bring to us.”
In his latest book, “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age,” Sanger discusses cybersecurity issues ranging from election interference to information warfare. At last week’s talk, he brought that lens to more recent events, like the strikes on oil refineries in Saudi Arabia and the ransomware attack that crippled Baltimore’s city government.
Sanger says cyber weaponry has dramatically changed the national security landscape. “It can be calibrated very finely in a way that nuclear weapons cannot,” he told the crowd at the Manchester Community Library.
“We have decided that it is so useful that like the drone, it will be used all the time,” he said. “But we don’t really have a real sense yet of how we’re going to use it, what theory is it working under, whether it’s actually a useful deterrent. So we have a lot to learn in that territory.”
Watch the full program courtesy of GNAT-TV, or download the audio to listen on your device.
