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.”
Tarah Wheeler
Tarah is a Cyber Project Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University‘s Kennedy School of Government. She is an International Security Fellow at New America leading a new international cybersecurity capacity building project with the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative and a US/UK Fulbright Scholar in Cyber Security for the 2020/2021 year. She is an Electronic Frontier Foundation advisory board member, an inaugural contributing cybersecurity expert for the Washington Post and a Foreign Policy contributor on cyber warfare. She has appeared on Bloomberg Asia on US-China trade and cybersecurity. She is the author of the best-selling Women In Tech: Take Your Career to The Next Level With Practical Advice And Inspiring Stories.
She is an information security researcher, political scientist in the area of international conflict, author, and poker player. She has been Head of Offensive Security & Technical Data Privacy at Splunk & Senior Director of Engineering and Principal Security Advocate at Symantec Website Security. She has led projects at Microsoft Game Studios (Halo and Lips) and architected systems at encrypted mobile communications firm Silent Circle. She has spoken on information security at the European Union, at the Malaysian Securities Commission, for Foreign Policy, the OECD and FTC, at universities such as Stanford, American, West Point, and Oxford, and multiple governmental and industry conferences. She has $3640 in lifetime cashes in the World Series of Poker. Reach her at @tarah.
Lord John Alderdice
In 1996 when he was elevated to the House of Lords (the Upper Chamber of the British Parliament) John Alderdice was one of the youngest ever life appointees to the House. Since then he has served as an active Liberal Democrat member of the House. From 2013 he has also been Director of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, based at the University of Oxford. From 1987 to 1998, Lord Alderdice was Leader of Northern Ireland's Alliance Party and one of the negotiators of the Good Friday Agreement. He was then the first Speaker of the new Northern Ireland Assembly until 2004 when he was appointed one of four international commissioners charged with overseeing security normalization in Ireland. From 2005 to 2009 he was President of Liberal International, the global family of more than 100 Liberal political parties (he is now a Presidente D’Honneur) and from 2010 to 2014 he was Chair of the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party in the House of Lords during the UK Conservative/Liberal Coalition Government.
He is currently a Deputy to the Lord Speaker of the House of Lords and a member of the Special Committee on COVID-19. He has retired as a doctor and psychiatrist but he continues as a Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College (University of Oxford) to work, lecture and write on the psychology of fundamentalism, radicalization, terrorism and intractable political violence and has been recognized with many prizes, honorary degrees and fellowships for his international contributions.