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
Rob Knake was a Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center and a Senior Fellow for Cyber Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Rob served from 2011 to 2015 as Director for Cybersecurity Policy at the National Security Council. In this role, he was responsible for the development of Presidential policy on cybersecurity and built and managed Federal processes for cyber incident response and vulnerability management. Rob is co-author of Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It and the Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats.
Last Updated: Mar 25, 2022, 3:26pm