Quotes from David E. Sanger

The United States Cyber Command was created partly in response to a Russian hacking attack that long predated the 2016 election.

After more than two decades of traveling with American presidents and chief diplomats - on visits to places that have included some of the world's most repressive nations - I am used to watching leaders disappear behind closed doors.

If you go in to vote, and you are no longer confident that the vote that you put in is the way it's going to get recorded because you don't know if the Russians or someone else have gotten into the voting system, that undercuts your trust in the democratic process.

What the Russians did in the election in 2016 was clearly short of war, yet it was a pretty aggressive act to go into another country's voting system.

As we put autonomous cars on the road, connect Alexas to our lights and our thermostats, put ill-protected Internet-connected video cameras on our houses, and conduct our financial lives over our cell phones, our vulnerabilities expand exponentially.

The United States lost a bit of the moral high ground when it comes to warning the world of the danger of cyberattacks.

American officials sometimes dig into corporations because they are suspected to be witting or unwitting suppliers of technology to the North Koreans or the Iranians.

Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of the electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot right back at us.

Never mention a web site is coming until it's already there.

It's no surprise that hackers working for North Korea, Iran's mullahs, Vladimir V. Putin in Russia, and the People's Liberation Army of China have all learned that the great advantage of cyberweapons is that they are the opposite of a nuke: hard to detect, easy to deny, and increasingly finely targeted.

State oil companies in Saudi Arabia, Africa, Iran, and Mexico have often been intelligence targets for the United States.

Unfettered markets eventually get out of whack.

There's this incredibly young, dynamic, educated population in Iran that is essentially pretty pro-American.

There is no single 'China model' to running a mega-economy. Instead, it is a blend. From the Europeans and the Japanese, the Chinese have borrowed the concept of protecting essential industries.

In an age of reckonings, when so many bills have come due, Obama has made the case for an America that can no longer do it all. It must pick its fights.

Under the Trump administration, the traditional structure of White House oversight of American offensive and defensive cyberactivities is being dismantled.

Although Mr. Trump will not be able to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, he can legally ignore its provisions, in keeping with his questioning of the existence of man-made climate change.

We had a great chance in the mid-2000s to reach an accord with the Chinese on both energy and environmental issues. That deal would have essentially been that the U.S. could provide the equipment and expertise, and the Chinese would help close the trade gap. It was a huge opportunity that we failed to exploit.

Until Japan's economy drove off a cliff, there was a running argument in Asia about whether it would be wiser to follow the 'Japan model' - with its megacorporations, jobs for life, state control of strategic industries - or the 'American model' of largely unfettered markets.

Back channels themselves are as old as American diplomacy. Thomas Jefferson was an early enthusiast - he often routed around his secretary of state, once sending a secret letter to the American envoy in France, Robert Livingston, that contained a coded message.

Once cyber crosses into the realm of the physical, then it's a physical attack, but it starts with cyber. And the idea of a cyber attack being able to take control of machines - that becomes a scary process.

I've been covering North Korea nuclear issues since I was a young reporter in the Tokyo bureau of 'The Times' and wrote some of the first pieces about the existence of the program at Yongbyon.

Mr. Obama is the first president to have grown up in the region - he lived in Indonesia as an elementary school student - and he has never doubted that America is underinvested in Asia and overinvested in the Middle East.

We have spent so much time worrying about a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,'' the attack that takes out the power grid, that we have focused far too little on the subtle manipulation of data that can mean that no election, medical record, or self-driving car can be truly trusted.