Quotes About Security

It is better to be safe than sorry.

You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did," noted Director of National Intelligence James Clapper after the OPM breach.80 From an intelligence perspective, it was a masterstroke.

Russia was almost certainly behind the 2015 and 2016 cyberattacks shutting off Ukrainian power to millions of customers87 and the 2017 NotPetya cyberattack targeting Ukrainian banks, agencies, and companies that spread worldwide, causing more than $10 billion in damage.88

Iran's offensive cyber operations have focused on destructive attacks, including a 2012 attack that destroyed thirty thousand Saudi Arabian computers91 and a 2014 attack that wiped hard drives at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas.

For intelligence officials, 9/11 was personal.

Cyberspace, by contrast, is manmade and inherently insecure. The Internet was never designed with security in mind.

In cyberspace, there are no mountains or oceans to protect people or their assets from others. Good neighborhoods and dangerous ones are unavoidably connected. We are all geographically unlucky.

This has the whiff of August 1945," said former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden, referring to the emergence of the atomic bomb. "That's a big deal."105

It's hard to imagine now, but as late as 2007, the Intelligence Community's annual threat assessment did not include the word cyber once.42 In 2009, cyber threats still ranked so low on the priority list, they were buried on page 38 of the forty-five-page threat assessment, just below drug trafficking in West Africa.43 Fast forward five years and the world looked very different, with cyber vaulting to the top tier of the 2012 intelligence threat list.

In 2018, about two billion people, or two-thirds of the online population, had their personal information stolen or compromised.

In geopolitics, the same information is not available to everyone, regardless of how much time they have. Intelligence is in the business of unlocking other people's secrets and protecting our own. Asymmetric information is the name of the game. And in a world of asymmetric information, prediction is much more difficult and miscalculation much more likely.

In 2018 cyber theft cost an estimated $600 billion globally. That's about as much as the global illicit drug trade.65 If cybercrime were a country, it would rank in the top twenty-five in terms of annual GDP.

because it is designed to secure national advantage. China is believed to have stolen trillions of dollars of intellectual property,67 including terabytes of data and schematics for the F-35 and F-22 stealth fighter jet programs, two of the most sophisticated aircraft in the U.S. arsenal.

Put most simply, intelligence is information that gives policymakers an advantage over their adversaries.

In addition, as discussed in chapter 4, working in an intelligence agency is not a job. It's a mission.

Many countries' intelligence services spy on their own citizens. In 2018, China spent more on internal security than external defense.

Anything running on code and connected to the Internet is a potential cyberattack vector. This global battlespace changes every time anyone on earth downloads an app, installs a patch, inserts a thumb drive, connects to airport Wi-Fi, or plugs in a smart toaster.

Securing advantage in this new world means that intelligence agencies must find new ways to work with private sector companies to combat online threats and harness commercial technological advances. They must engage the universe of open-source data to capture the power of its insights. And they must serve a broader array of intelligence customers outside of government to defend the nation.

The most serious threats from a national security perspective don't come from Cheeto-eating teens. They come from well-trained operatives and proxies operating at the behest of four countries: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Together, these four nations are behind 77 percent of all suspected state-sponsored cyberattacks since 2005.

China's intellectual property theft strikes at the heart of economic power. It was considered so serious, Gen. Keith Alexander, once the nation's top cyberwarrior, called it "the greatest transfer of wealth in history.

We protected America from what happened, like a man takes care of his wife. The man doesn't mind when she closes her eyes at the scary part of the ride, of the movie. He loves her for that sweet, willful ignorance. She gives him something to protect, a nice world in which bad things don't happen. It's a pleasure, and a relief, to keep that ignorance intact, even as it comes between them.

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.) The country had a leader. Hired girls had

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.)