The Rising Danger of the Cyber World

JACKSONVILLE, FLA.-- Three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, David E. Sanger, spoke to the University of North Florida audience Tuesday evening on the dangers that cyber warfare may impose on the United States and how the best solution is a political one. 

Sanger is also the National Security Correspondent for The New York Times and a National Security and Political Contributor for CNN. Sanger's speech reflected his latest book, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age. 

In his opening remarks, Sanger drew opposition in the Watergate scandal and what a breach in information involves today. Watergate was a physical operation: breaking into filing cabinets and obtaining documents, while cyber break-ins involve hacking into a server that can be accomplished by someone miles or countries away. Technology has changed rapidly and part of it has become a danger to security.  

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The cyber age is one to be compared to the nuclear age, Sanger said cyberattacks are the number one threat to our country right now. 

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"The thing to remember is that, while some of the solutions here are technological, many of them are political. All of them require allies. When we confronted another superpower that could destroy the United States with nuclear weapons we did two things: we built missile defenses [...] and we reached for political solutions. We reduced the number of weapons, we set rules about when it is you could use them, we created rules of transparency. [...] We are going to need political solutions here as well," Sanger stated.

Sanger made a stretch in comparing the cyber world to that of the invention of the airplane. Once the airplane was invented, its use was limited to observing at a high level and no one, at first, though about the weaponry that could be attached to it. The same goes for technology, e-mails were for one use and it was not originally thought to be used as a weapon. The technology evolved so that an airplane could deliver the atomic bomb. 

Sanger said, "In the cyber world, we know what the delivery system is. Just as we know what the airplane was. We don't know what the war hand is. We don't know what it is that is going to get delivered thirty years from now. We hope it doesn't have this kind of destructive capability [as nuclear bombs]."

In other words, a B-29 bomber is to World War II as 5G is to today. 

Sanger says that cyber can be and is used for espionage, manipulation of data, destructive purposes and political goals. 

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Member of the audience, Catherine Howard, commented on the speech saying, "I think the most impactful thing I learned in this lecture tonight is that 5G is going to erase cybersecurity as we know it and open up the world to all sorts of vulnerabilities, from technology into politics, geopolitics and everything else the cyber world is touching right now." 

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"We need more than just a technological solution. You haven't heard this discussed much in the political [world], in part that's because we've wrapped so much secrecy around cyber that we haven't discussed what the trade-outs are. We did a better job in the nuclear era. We had a big, open debate about how and when to use them. We've never had that debate about cyber because it crept up on us," Sanger said. 

His lecture on the 5G era called for political action to the imposing threats, rather than technology trying to fight out technology. 

Sanger left his audience to think with these final words, "That's the issue we're facing. As 5G comes in, this issue will become only more urgent. I'm not suggesting for a moment that we slow down or stop 5G. We couldn't if we wanted to. But we have to go into it with our eyes open. This time, unlike the last internet generation, we want to think first about what we want to do."