The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
Speaker
Dr. Elissa M. Redmiles is a faculty member and research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and a Visiting Scholar at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University for the '22-'23 academic year. She uses computational, economic, and social science methods to understand people's digital safety & ethics decision-making processes and remedy inequities in those processes. Her work has been recognized with multiple paper awards at USENIX Security, ACM CCS, ACM CHI, and ACM EAAMO and has been featured in popular press publications such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and Wired.
