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
Karly was the Deputy Director of ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre during 2022 and is currently at the Harvard Kennedy School as a Recanati-Kaplan fellow for Intelligence and Security.
Karly spent over 20 years working in technical and leadership roles across cyber security, cryptography, data science and engineering within Defence. As a subject matter expert, she has written strategies and provided advice and assistance to the national security community, government and ADF on encryption, cyber vulnerabilities and adversarial machine learning to protect national data assets and infrastructure.
She has held long and short-term positions overseas, working particularly with the UK and US governments to facilitate collaboration with Australian agencies. She maintains a strong interest in enabling the awareness and understanding of science and emerging technologies, and particularly with initiatives that encourage diversity and women in STEM. Karly has a Masters degree in Science Communication from ANU and a Bachelor of Mathematics and Computer Science from University of Adelaide.
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