The Perfect Weapon

January 1, 2018

What's a bigger threat to America's safety than terrorism or even nuclear attack? Cyberwarfare, which is easy to acquire, hard to guard against, and able to disrupt and damage key infrastructure and, as we are seeing, influence elections. Chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, Sanger (The Inheritance) shocks us awake.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 11, 2018
Computer and cyber warfare is a burgeoning mode of conflict that poses serious threats to the United States, Pulitzer-winning New York Times correspondent Sanger (Confront and Conceal) argues in this perhaps overly worried investigation. Sanger rehashes the notorious Russian hacks during the 2016 American election along with lesser-known digital assaults on the United States, including the installation of Russian malware on systems that control—and could shut down—U. S. power and communications grids; Russian hacks of White House, Pentagon, and NSA networks, the last putting secret American hacking tools in the hands of miscreants; and Iranian and Chinese hacks of banks, corporations, and government databases. America, he notes, is hardly innocent, having engineered the Stuxnet attack on Iranian nuclear centrifuges and a possible sabotage of North Korean missiles. He further warns that federal responses to these attacks have been feckless and shrouded in a secrecy that makes prevention harder. Sanger gives a lucid account of national programs for digital espionage and warfare, but it’s not always clear that the various technologies described hold much danger; for example, he doesn’t make a strong case that Russian spoofing of social media accounts really undermines American democracy. Readers could use a more thorough exploration of the limitations of supposedly perfect digital weapons.