Science & Technology

"Along with punishment and denial, entanglement is an important means of making an actor perceive that the costs of an action will exceed the benefits.  Entanglement refers to the existence of  interdependences which makes a successful attack simultaneously impose serious costs on the attacker as well as the victim. This is not unique to cyber. For example, in 2009, when the People's Liberation Army urged the Chinese government to dump some of China's massive holdings of dollar reserves to punish the United States for selling arms to Taiwan, the Central Bank pointed out that this would impose large costs on China as well and the government decided against it."

"Like-minded nations should also agree that governments should not steal data from private corporations and then give that information to competing companies, as the government of China has been doing on a massive scale. The victims of Chinese economic espionage should seek to establish clear guidelines and penalties within the World Trade Organization system or, if China blocks that, victim states should seek to develop countermeasures and sanctions outside of that structure."

"...[N]ew jobs can be directly created in the design, construction, operation and maintenance of infrastructure projects. However, such job creation is unlikely to happen unless there are deliberate policy guidelines. This is mainly because construction projects tend to focus primarily on immediate cost-effectiveness and less on indirect benefits such as youth employment."

"The conventional wisdom among those who looked at the Middle East used to be that you had a choice either of supporting the autocrat or being stuck with the religious extremists. The extraordinary diffusion of information created in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries reveals a strong middle that we weren't fully aware of. What is more, new technologies allow this new middle to coordinate in ways unseen before Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, and this could lead to a very different politics of the Middle East. This introduces a new complexity to our government's dealings with the region."

"There is widespread agreement that this long-term trend of grabbing the economic gains from information technology advances and ignoring their security costs has reached a crisis point," write Melissa Hathaway and Jack Goldsmith. "As we progress digitally, we must also adopt and embed sometimes-costly security solutions into our core infrastructures and enterprises and stop playing the game of chance."