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.”
Please join the Intelligence Project for a webinar with the Honorable Mike Rogers, Belfer Center Senior Fellow and Former Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and David E. Sanger, Belfer Center Senior Fellow, adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School and national security correspondent and a senior writer at The New York Times.
In this session, we will look ahead to the 2020 U.S. election cycle and discuss what we can expect in terms of state-sponsored disinformation and disruption. Questions we will cover include:
- Do we expect similar efforts to disrupt the 2020 election cycle as we saw in 2016? From which actors? Has China become a disinformation player? Iran? Do we see any signs of changes in Russian behavior
- Do non-state actors pose a more serious disinformation threat in this election?
- Have we improved our capability to detect and deter electoral disruption?
- How do we measure the real impact of foreign disinformation?
We will also hear from the Belfer Center’s Defending Digital Democracy Project about what their team has been seeing in this arena, and how different states and localities are perceiving and preparing for the inevitable attacks on our election system.
