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.”
Biography
Emily Middleton was a Master in Public Policy 2018 candidate and a Kennedy Memorial Trust Scholar at Harvard Kennedy School. Emily is interested in how emerging technologies – especially financial technology – can be better leveraged to benefit the most vulnerable and disenfranchised populations. She spent the summer of 2017 with UNICEF’s global Office of Innovation, focusing on their “Future of Money” portfolio. At HKS, she is a co-founder of the Social Innovation Studio – a community and a physical space for students to tackle specific social problems through innovation. Before HKS, she was a consultant for four years with The Boston Consulting Group in the UK, Malaysia and Indonesia. She also spent four months at the European Union Delegation to Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa, conducting political analysis and research. She holds a first class honors B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford.
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