Quotes from Jared Cohen

Since most cyberwar is conducted covertly, governments avoid any public acknowledgment of their own abilities and shy away from engaging in any sort of 'cyber diplomacy.' Statecraft conducted in secret fails to create public norms for deterrence.

I'll say that technology will make revolutions start happening faster, but it'll make them harder to finish. Technology can't create leaders and cause institutions to appear.

Name any issue in the world, I can tell you how technology is intertwined with it. I can tell you how technology will make it better. How it can make it worse. It needs to be part of everything that we do, whether you are a government or a company or a citizen.

By definition, transnational crime crosses borders, but efforts to combat it mostly do not.

When you work at Google and tell these engineers that their skill set is relevant to somebody in Iran who doesn't have access to information in their country or the rest of the world, it really inspires them to want to do something about it. There is a genuine altruism that exists at this company, and that's why I'm here and not anywhere else.

At a certain point, a critical mass of people either have used the Internet or have expectations. Anything less than the free flow of information will be seen as having something taken away. We've seen time and again - in Egypt and Iran, for example - that creates a backlash.

The importance of human judgment does not evaporate in the future, and as connected individuals, we will have to exercise sound judgment about what we choose to share or not share about ourselves.

Every single young person is reachable. Ask them what dating is like in their country. Ask them if they have a girlfriend. Ask them what their type is. There's nobody who's too conservative to talk about that.

When people think of digital diplomacy, they think of government tweeting. It is not what it is. That is public diplomacy.

Privacy and security are the ultimate shared responsibility, and everyone - including governments, companies, and citizens - have an important role to play.

While the specifics of Russia's interference in the 2016 American election remain unclear, no one doubts that Moscow has built a robust technological arsenal for waging cyberattacks.

Essentially, it's not that technology or cyberspace is some parallel universe that operates tangentially from the world we know; it is simply a new front in the international system.

The big unknown is, at what point is a cyberattack so significant that it warrants a physical-world response.

When we're splitting our time between a physical and digital world, you have to stay safe online the same way you stay safe offline.

It's not a panacea: there are problems in the world that technology can't fix. You can't fix water shortages. You can't storm a Ministry of the Interior with a cell phone. You can't magically create leaders and institutions overnight. You can't eat it. You can't shield a bullet.

Technology can be useful to organise a large number of people online and offline against the common goal of getting a particular dictator out of power. But at the end of the day, somebody still has to run for president with a different last name and deliver for the population.

I always say that the largest party in every country - the largest opposition group in every country - is the youth party.

I think, when I wrote 'Children of Jihad,' I wrote it with a very optimistic view of what technology can do. Today I maintain that optimistic view, but I'm also aware of the challenges we have. So I would say I'm not a techno-utopian, but I'm a techno-pragmatist.

Part of the responsibility of the technology industry is to anticipate the challenges of the vast majority of its future users and proactively start thinking about them now and proactively build products that address those challenges.

I often say Policy Planning is very analogous to a venture capital firm. A venture capital firm sees an interesting idea and puts money behind it; in Policy Planning, we look for promising ideas and then put contacts and relationships behind it.

I think companies need to put up tools that put privacy and security in the hands of their users and make it easy to understand those tools. In Google's case, two-step verification is a perfect example of this.

For people involved in pre-meditated crimes, whether it is terrorism or robbery or something else, their use of technology means that they leave a digital trail, and the room for error goes up dramatically. In the future, it will be easier for violent people to make mistakes and get caught before they commit their crimes.

The virtual world is a 'public square' much more vast than Tiananmen Square. And you can't send in the tanks to crush the netizens.