Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

"This book is by Fred Kaplan and it’s a historical study of the ways that governments—and in particular the US government—have tried to think about and use cyberpower for state-to-state conflict. He looks at what the origins of that were in the 1980s and how it has evolved over the past 30 or so years. Again, he comes at it not from the technical world, but as someone who’s interested in how governments adapt to new threats and incorporate new types of power into their arsenals. He does a really thorough reporting job, talking to people who have been involved in this all along the way and looking at the ways they were influenced. He talks about WarGames , the 1983 movie starring Matthew Broderick, and how influential that was in shaping the government’s ideas about cyber power. I think it’s so important—especially for people who work on the technical side of these things—to understand the ways in which policymakers’ ideas about technology and cyber security get shaped. It’s so easy to rail about how nobody understands computers, and how if only Ronald Reagan had understood this or that. But the reality is that there are a lot of people making policy for whom these technologies are very foreign and very unfamiliar. They don’t know a lot about how they work. It is both important to understand the history of how we got to where we are and also understand that this is still true moving forward. We have a Supreme Court in the United States with a lot of people who did not grow up with these technologies and still are not necessarily comfortable using them. That comes through when they ask questions in cases related to technology and it comes through when they make rulings about these technologies. So I like that historical perspective on how we got to where we are now. What is it that’s going through the heads of the people in government who are making these decisions? And whether or not it’s always absolutely factually accurate or technically sophisticated, understanding those forces is really important and really interesting. That philosophy has clearly influenced a lot of really powerful people when they approach this domain. What was most interesting for me about the book was how people in power think about computers: what they think the risks are and what they think the opportunities are for using them. That tone is set, to large degree, by the people who run governments. If you look at administration changes in the US there are people who are very cautious and think this could be very risky. Their approach to computers and cyberpower is very different from people who come in and say, ‘This is how you win in the 21st century!’ All of these books are written by people with a strong sense of narrative, which is one of the reasons that I admire them. A lot of books about cyber security are structured as, ‘here’s the section on passwords and here’s the section on viruses.’ All of these are authors who really get that if you want to draw people in and make them interested in this you have to be telling stories and stories with real characters and real stakes."