Asia & the Pacific

Russian cyber operations against the United States aim to both collect information and develop offensive capabilities against future targets. Washington must strengthen its defenses in response.

"But what about deterring operations that are not equivalent to an armed attack? There are grey areas in which important targets, say, a free political process, are not strategically vital in the same way as the electrical grid or the financial system. Destroying the latter two could damage lives and property; interference with the former threatens deeply held political values."

"...[A]ctors that employ gray tactics in cyber operations need not be successful in actually infiltrating a system to further their revisionist ambitions. Rather, the sheer ramifications from the cyber action itself, has the power to disturb a nation's psyche and challenge the geopolitical status quo."

This paper addresses a growing concern to one of the most fundamental components of our democracy: how cybersecurity risks can influence the integrity of our elections.

"As the U.S. Congress considers the appropriate role for the federal government in the encryption debate, policymakers should be mindful of the impact of their actions both within and beyond the United States. To date, the U.S. and Europe are on one side of an Internet governance spectrum favoring the multi-stakeholder status quo with India in the middle, followed by China, and Russia undertaking the most state-centric approach to both Internet governance generally and encryption specifically."

The Project on Managing the Atom offers fellowships for pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and mid-career researchers for one year, with a possibility for renewal, in the stimulating environment of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. The online application for 2016-2017 fellowships opened December 15, 2015, and the application deadline is January 15, 2016. Recommendation letters are due by February 1, 2016.