Science & Technology

With little public fanfare, U.S. Cyber Command, the military’s new center for combating electronic attacks against the United States, has launched operations to deter and disrupt Russians who have been interfering with the U.S. political system.

As the age of artificial intelligence transforms warfare, the Pentagon faces a delicate problem: How does it convince employees of high-tech companies based in the United States that Americans are still the “good guys,” so that they’ll lend their talents to U.S. national security projects?

One of the most satisfying moments in any spy thriller is when the bad guy — the black-hat operative who has been killing and tormenting his adversaries — does something dumb and gets caught. That’s essentially what’s been happening recently with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s pet spy agency, the GRU.

Nicholas Burns, the former US Ambassador to NATO, says President Trump is in denial and he is not protecting Americans from the vast Russian conspiracy to undermine Americans elections and democracy.

Amid the slithering mess of problems that emerged in 2017, the one that bothers me most is that people don’t seem to know what’s true anymore. “Facts” this year got put in quotation marks.

Three questions for four participants of the Richard C. Holbrooke Forum’s “Digital Diplomacy Project: Power, Innovation and Order in a Networked World,” which was held in Tallinn, Estonia, from November 5-7, 2017.

Nicholas Burns talks with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell about claims by a Russian oligarch jailed by President Putin that Putin is paranoid and the future of Russia's leader. 

Nick Burns talks with Andrea Mitchell about additional revelations about Russia's use of social media (Twitter, Facebook) to influence outcome of 2016 U.S. Presidential election. 

Intelligence officers sometimes talk about “blowback,” when covert actions go bad and end up damaging the country that initiated them. A year later, that is surely the case with Russia’s secret attempt to meddle in the U.S. presidential election, which has brought a string of adverse unintended consequences for Moscow.